I’ve been fretting over why so many smart people don’t quite get what we’ve been trying to express with Mock Objects, and why we as a group think it matters. There’s an experience we haven’t been getting across properly. I think the step that’s missing is the extent to which we use the Tell, Don’t Ask pattern.
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February, 2004:
The big idea is “messaging”
Don’t buy bean bags
Some managemers seem to think that using bean bags in your office space will make their people more creative and inventive. I just heard a great story, at one level of indirection, from one of the original Smalltalk crew at Xerox PARC – the archetypal bean bag institution.
It seems that they introduced bean bags because the people there were so argumentative that the only way anyone could get their point across was if they made it just too much trouble for the others to leap up and interrupt. They introduced bean bags to inhibit discussion, not facilitate it.
It’s such a good story, I hope it’s true.
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