Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!usenet.pasdenom.info!aioe.org!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: markspace <-@.> Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Re: naming convention Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2011 19:30:49 -0700 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 33 Message-ID: References: <24535832.204.1319075629822.JavaMail.geo-discussion-forums@prfk19> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2011 02:30:52 +0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: mx04.eternal-september.org; posting-host="XjIWM99mD7Ijfdu600oVPA"; logging-data="620"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/tgGIgsjO1Rw4xQx7AkxzXrOrgiyN40Gg=" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:7.0.1) Gecko/20110929 Thunderbird/7.0.1 In-Reply-To: <24535832.204.1319075629822.JavaMail.geo-discussion-forums@prfk19> Cancel-Lock: sha1:nYOYYvk82hZ2eu5Fc2Kk69BbBC4= Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.lang.java.programmer:9015 On 10/19/2011 6:53 PM, Lew wrote: > What makes something "officially" a design pattern? Consensus? Honestly I don't know. I've never seen map-reduce called a "pattern" though so I'm being conservative in my terminology. *I* don't know that it's a pattern, so I don't want to suggest that it is. > If it's a pattern, and it is at the design level, isn't it perforce a > design pattern, "officially" or not notwithstanding? I don't think that calling everything that occurs frequently in programing a "pattern" is useful terminology. For the term "pattern" to have meaning besides "thing" it has to have some sort of restricted or qualified domain. And I haven't see a definition of pattern, besides what GOF put in their book. So for now, I think it's not, until there's some sort of consensus about what to call these things. And I do think that map-reduce deserves some sort of special nomenclature, but whether "pattern" is the best word I don't know. What's the difference between a pattern, an algorithm, and a system? I don't rightly know. Thinking about now just off the top of my head, the GOF design patterns were all fairly small in their scope, and map-reduce is a rather large system in its scope and use. Anyway, for now map-reduce is special enough to have its own name: map-reduce.