I had to take another routine flight from Stuttgart (Germany) to Madrid (Spain). Having slept too little, and stayed far too long in #ruby-lang, I forgot to check properly that I had no lethal weapons in my hand luggage. So, not really to my surprise, I had one. Actually, in my pockets. A 3cm long Swiss army knife. I had to put it in my backpack and check in again. The flight would take over 2H and I had some time before boarding, so I thought I’d need something to read and took ‘Design Patterns’ as a light reading.

On the way to the plane, one American (you’d not expect to see many of them in a small city of Old Europe nowadays) saw my book and pointed "not many people would read this book for fun". And then right after "I used to work with John Vlissides in IBM" (he’s the fourth name in the Gang of Four). Now, isn’t the world small?

We then talked shortly about design patterns being most helpful in statically typed languages. Indeed, most of them are not needed when using dynamic typing. And when you do need them, they are (exceedingly) easy to think of and implement.

I was surprised to see that he knew Ruby.

It was only much later that I remembered that he told me he was a Pythonist. This means (obviously) that we should have fought to death. Too bad we forgot it ;)