Mon, 22 Aug 2005
OOPSLA hotel room promotion
Richard P. Gabriel, program
chair of OOPSLA, has started a
promotion. The person who refers the most
attendees by September 15 (up to a max of one per
day) gets to stay in
rpg's suite. (Hotels "comp" conference
organizers with free suites. It's one of the
compensations
for doing the work.) I don't care about
staying in a suite. What attracts me is the
idea of a free hotel room. If you
register through the link in this paragraph or the image on the right, you will subsidize my
cheapskatery.
Or you may prefer to
compete
with me.
## Posted at 09:29 in category /conferences
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More on counterexamples
Andy Schneider responded to my counterexamples
post with the following. I think they're neat ideas.
-
I express project scope in terms of what the project is delivering and what it is not
delivering. I learnt to do this in 1994, after listening to a bunch of people interpret my scope
statements in different ways, depending on what they wanted to read into them. On the surface it
seems daft to list all the things a project is not, it'd be a long list. However, there is always
some obvious set of expectations you know you're aren't going to fill and some obvious confusions.
I use those to draw up my 'Is Not' Lists.
-
I'm writing a lot of papers laying down design principles for common architectural scenarios,
trying to get some re-use at the design level and also trying to improve productivity by having
the boring stuff already sorted for 80% of the cases. I communicate my principles with a narrative
text within which the user 'discovers' the principles (which I highlight so it can be read by
consuming the principles). At the end of the paper I normally write a section labelled something
like implications. Here i walk through a set of counter-examples that describe practices that
contradict the principles. This gets people to think about the implications of what's being said.
Creates me a bunch of work working through the feedback, as these sections always elicit more
feedback than the rest. If I didn't provide counter-examples no one would consider the space not
covered or excluded by the principles.
So, I've learnt it is useful, I have seen the fact it gets people to think about what something
is not and the feedback from people is always better for it. In many ways it is opposite to a
politician's approach, where they avoid counterexamples because they want you to read into their
words what you want to. They don't want you to consider the space not covered or excluded.
(Reprinted with permission.)
## Posted at 08:47 in category /ideas
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