TITLE: A Fun Analogy on Garbage Collection
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: December 10, 2004  3:46 PM
DESC: Looking for real world examples of technical ideas can be a way to help students grok an idea.
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BODY:
Recently, jaybaz made an
<A HREF="http://blogs.msdn.com/jaybaz_ms/archive/2004/12/03/274853.aspx">
   interesting analogy</A>
between garbage collection and, well, garbage collection:

<BLOCKQUOTE>
<I>What if Garbage Collection was like Garbage Collection?</I>

<P> Every Thursday morning at 6:00am, the garbage truck stops
in front of your house.  A scruffy man in an orange jumpsuit
steps down, walks up to your front door, and lets himself in.

<P> He walks around the house, picking up each item you own,
and asks, "Are you still using this?"  If you don't say "yes",
he carts it away.
</BLOCKQUOTE>

What if we turned the analogy around?  Be sure to check out
the reader comments to his article.

When I teach design patterns, I like to make analogies to
real-world examples, like television remote controls (iterator)
and various kinds of adapter.  I think a set of analogies
for all the garbage collection techniques we use in programming
language implementation would make a fun teaching tool.
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