I also care about the issues!

[quote]Sun Microsystems Demands University Study Retraction

The University of Washington, apparently hoping to capitalize on the recent hype around their controversial study on Baby Einstein™-style videos, followed up yesterday with another, similar study. In the new study, researchers found that Java programmers understand an average of seven fewer Computer Science concepts per hour spent with Java each day compared to similar programmers using other languages. Sun calls the study "seriously flawed", citing the fact that you can combine the names of Gang of Four Design Patterns to form new Computer Science concepts that all Java programmers understand, such as the ObserverFactoryBridge, the BridgeFactoryObserver, and the well-known FactoryObserverBridgeChainOfCommandSingletonProxy, beloved of Java programmers everywhere. Java experts at Sun say they're not sure how many combinations there are of the twenty-three pattern names, but there are "definitely a lot of them."
[/quote]

It's true. Java programmers do have a tendency to not be familiar with the new programming paradigms that Web 2.0 bring out daily. So, in an effort to do my bit to help these poor developers, i decided to calculate exactly how many combinations of the 23 pattern names there are. After spending hours with a pen and paper doing lots of complex multiplication, differentiation, division and.... addition, i came up with this answer:

There are 7 possible combinations of the 23 names.

So for all you java people out there, there's not much to remember. You can thank me later, a pint will do.