A couple of articles back, I reviewed Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns and mentioned that it’s a book that concentrates on the tactics of programming rather than the big strategic stuff. Beck even takes his life in his hands and lays down a set of patterns for laying out code. The (very short) set of patterns he comes up with do seem to generate remarkably clear code. I’m a big fan of this book, and I’ve lifted many of the ideas about how to structure Smalltalk code and used them when I’m writing OO Perl (to the extent that I sometimes find myself wishing that Perl had Smalltalk like message selectors), so now I’m toying with the idea of using Beck’s rules, or something like them, for laying out my Perl code.