raganwald
(This is a snapshot of my old weblog. New posts and selected republished essays can be found at raganwald.com.)

Wednesday, January 03, 2007
  A Fellow Traveller's Road to Enlightenment


I began to see that many of the sacred GoF design patterns were not, in actuality, grand universal truths of software engineering, but simply collateral damage caused by incidental limitations in the abstractive power and object model of certain manifestly-typed programming languages.
—Arto Bendiken, The Road to Enlightenment is Littered with Irritating, Superfluous Parentheses

A wonderful read.

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  11:32 AM

Comments on “A Fellow Traveller's Road to Enlightenment”:
Somewhere along the way, we stopped thinking of patterns as a convenient way to describe common abstractions to other people, but as a blueprint for software design.

This misconception has lead to more bad software design than any language or framework can ever take credit for.
# posted by Blogger KirinDave : 8:43 PM
 
Design patterns are still useful when you're stuck working with these languages, which remain very popular.

To kirindave's point, you need to use your judgement, and that's where patterns get abused. It seems unfair to blame this on the patterns, though. Even GoF's first chapter says, "A design pattern should only be applied when the flexibility it affords is actually needed."

Thanks for the link, Reginald...
# posted by Anonymous Dan Bernier : 2:16 PM
 




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Reg Braithwaite


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Homoiconic Technical Writing / raganwald.posterous.com

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What I‘ve Learned From Failure / Kestrels, Quirky Birds, and Hopeless Egocentricity

Share
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