East: a technique?
A person I admire and look up to who will probably want to go unrecognised so lets call him S.Hayes, no no, lets call him Steve.H. Anyway he responded to the draft article “A Design Compass: East Oriented” by saying that he didn’t see East so much as a new principle but more of an approach, especially since it provided much the same benefits as existing principles like “Hollywood”, “Tell Don’t ask” and “Inversion of Control”.
After some reflection on this I felt that Steve was mostly right and that the best path forward was to “pitch” East as a technique rather than a principle. So if you want a technique that you can apply to existing code or new code to help make it better then please try the East Technique.
The East Technique in a nutshell (as it applies to Java):
- A method is either void or it returns ‘this’.
- A method should be oriented East.
To really understand what #2 means you need to read the draft article since it covers this with examples of taking existing code and orienting it East.
If you give the East Technique a try then I look forward to hearing about your experiences with it.