delegation (was: prototypical analysis and design)

[Bharat Bedia]

--- In self-interest at egroups.com, Jecel Assumpcao Jr <jecel at m...> 
wrote:
> Me too. I was attracted to the practical side of Self's "exploratory
> programming" style. Since you were asking about "analysis", I 
thought
> you meant things like Booch and UML and other things that I am not
> familiar with, which is why I made no comment.
When i first got Self to work on my solaris machine I found it very 
very cool. I very much enjoyed the freedom & exploratory style. But 
like the old "Lord of the Rings" game on Commodore64 you can only 
explore so much then you have to solve your mission objective! 
Unfortunately, I don't have access to a Sun computer anymore so I 
can't run Self :-(

Everybody carries out some element of analysis. Some people call it 
thinking others call it UML ;-) However, you can "analyse" until the 
project manager screams at you then you must develop and code. I was 
hoping to hear about various strategies and modelling techniques 
people use to :
a. model the problem domain, and
b. convert the model into an application 

(This doesn't have to be in Self. Perhaps someone can point me to a 
notation for describing prototypical systems - analogous to UML for 
OO systems?)

So for example in the real world, things change and perhaps even in 
the evolutionary exploratory Self environment, you may get 
brittleness in the "older" parts of the application. Part of the 
analysis is to try and perceive the potential for change and so 
design in the flexibility. I was wondering what techniques people had 
used to pre-empt these issues (eg. inflexibility) in the prototypical 
world? 

> It would be very interesting to go through all the patterns in the
> "Design Patterns" book (which I have just read) and look at them 
from
> the viewpoint of a prototype based language. I'll try to do so 
later,
Now I would be most interested on that!