Beer and Motivation

This post is not about my drinking habits. It's about a couple of paragraph's from "Object Thinking" by David West. Since "beer" does not appear in the index, the paragraphs are on page 298.

The author states that the beer is trying to get into a bottle, get capped, and into a truck. One obvious (and wrong) way of implementing this would be to make the beer a controlling object ("Vat, pour me into a bottle", "Capper, cap me", etc.). This approach is wrong because the control becomes too centralized.

So how would you implement this? Could you use events?

For example, the beer registers with the vat so that the beer is told when a vat full of fresh beer is ready. The bottle registers with the beer so that the bottle can be told when the beer is ready to be poured into the bottle. I'm not sure I like this approach. If I look at these objects as humans, as the author encourages, I see behavior that I don't like to see in humans. It's that whole, "I'm ready (and tapping my foot while I'm waiting for you to meet my expectations)." If you link enough of these kind of events together, I'm concerned that you'll have a lot of weak links and hard to follow logic.

That is why I want to implement some simple system based on the principles found in "Object Thinking"; to see if my concerns are valid.


In a podcast (part two of two) the author talks more about the beer.