‘Twas The Night Before OOPSLA

The annual meeting of the world’s most influential and best programmers can be found at OOPSLA (Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications.) In the early 1990s, it was at OOPSLA meetings that the Gang of Four first began spooling out the design patterns that became the core of their book, Design Patterns. Ever since I began going to OOPSLA meetings in 2006, I’ve been able to slip in some of the internet languages like PHP and ActionScript 3.0. I first posted this thinly-disguised version of the Night Before Christmas a couple of years ago and have decided to make it an annual event. So here it is with a few tweaks:

The Night Before OOPSLA

‘Twas the night before OOPSLA, when all through the watt
Not a coder was stirring, not even a bot;
The downloads were placed on the server with care,
In hopes that St. Singleton soon would be there;
The young geeks were nestled all snug by their screens,
While visions of killer apps arose from their dreams;
And mamma with her iMac, and I with my Dell,
Had just settled down to write code for a spell,
When out on the net there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my chair to see what was the matter.
Away to the keyboard I loaded my cache,
Tore open the folders and emptied the trash.
The apps on the iPad all came alive
Gave the lustre of update to objects on-drive,
When, what on my screen came clear in my glasses,
But a miniature program, and eight tiny classes,
With a little old hacker, so fat like a pork,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Dork.
More rapid than skip lists his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name;
“Now, Factory! now, Context! now, Product and State!
On, Flyweight! on Proxy! on, Builder, Template!
To the top of the dock! to the top of the sprawl!
Now refractor! refractor! refractor all!”
As bits wrapped in packets over the routers do fly
When they meet with an obstacle they return to retry,
So up to the server the coursers they flew,
With program dependencies, errors, and St. Singleton too.
And then, in a twinkling, I picked up my mug
Full of java to seek out each little bug.
As I drew in my mouse, and was clicking around,
Down the accessor St. Singleton came with a bound.
He was messing with properties and methods to boot,
My protected objects were wrecked to the root;
A bundle of type hints he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a newbie overloading the stack.
His eyes — how they glazed! his pimples how icky!
His cheeks were like pizzas, his nose was all sticky!
His droll little mouth had precious few graces,
And when he smiled I was blinded by braces;
The stump of a pencil shown up from his pocket protector,
He stumbled around like Clouseau the inspector;
He had a broad face and was fat as a pie,
When he walked he looked like the Comic Book Guy.
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old geek,
And I laughed when he tried to give my pattern a tweak;
A wink of his eye and a blast of hot gas,
Soon gave me to know that this guy was crass
He spoke not a word, but started hacking his work,
And filled all the memory; then turned like a jerk,
And laying his finger straight up his nose,
And giving a fart, up the access he rose;
He sprang to his program, to his team issued a command,
And the whole thing crashed like a wave on the sand,
But I heard him exclaim, ere he limped out of sight,

“Happy Coding to all and to all a good night.”

The Best to everyone,
Bill Sanders

Copyright © 2012 William Sanders. All Rights Reserved.