Nov
11th
Fri
11th
While Observer Synchronization is nice it does have a downside. The problem with Observer Synchronization is the core problem of the observer pattern itself - you can’t tell what is happening by reading the code. I was reminded of this very forcefully when trying to figure out how some Smalltalk 80 screens worked. I could get so far by reading the code, but once the observer mechanism kicked in the only way I could see what was going on was via a debugger and trace statements. Observer behavior is hard to understand and debug because it’s implicit behavior.
— Martin Fowler, “GUI Architectures”
