Comments on: Design patterns

By: Trey Jackson

Trey Jackson — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 18:07:41 +0000

Amen! While I agree that some design patterns are like "baking a cake" (e.g. MVC), many are only useful to work around language problems (for c++: pimpl, chain of responsibility, visitor, etc.).

By: Seth Veale

Seth Veale — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 23:46:23 +0000

Well said. Obviously a bit old now though

As somebody relatively new to programming (8 years, incl uni), and having learnt with languages like Java and then (pro/re)gressed to C and Lisp-derivatives later on, patterns seem a lot less interesting. Every API I used when I was learning had patterns in it, and the patterns are more or less obvious because of that. Reading GoF was a bit of an anti-climax. PoEA was a bit more interesting.

I look at patterns as a perspective on a problem. It's like loops and recursion being different but roughly equivalent perspectives on repetition.

What I'd like is a language with a good way of communicating perspective, rather than a bunch of "sugar" features.

By: Matt V

Matt V — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 21:10:22 +0000

I'm not religious about tech stuff at all, but it seems to me you are very confused about what a pattern is. Take a non-programming example - baking a cake. The pattern 'baking a cake' is not a cake, and it is not a recipe either. When I say "I am baking a cake", you know what I mean, even if you don't know what kind of cake I'm baking, or what recipe I'm using.

So using a 'strategy' pattern in a program doesn't imply any particular language or code implementation, it is just a more general 'way' of doing something.

By: clord

clord — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 20:53:47 +0000

(this said by someone who maintains 200+kloc of C, cry)

By: clord

clord — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 20:52:23 +0000

"automating the generation of pattern implementations rather than trying to encode patterns themselves"

They said the same thing about virtual function tables way back when too. "That's just a table of pointers passed around implicitly, it's not ACTUAL virtual methods."

Of course, now days compilers can actually recognize the pattern and convert explicitly virtual objects back into static calls when possible and safe, whereas the old grey C programmers with their tables of function tables either have to break the design pattern and dogma to match that performance gain, or else suffer through a lot of kludge.

By: Dale

Dale — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 20:43:29 +0000

Couldn't agree more, but, unfortunately I think you find this kind of rabid devotion common in many aspects of the developer communities. I've always thought of patterns as plastic, that they can change and bend, and even be discarded as the languages/environment/needs change - but try telling that to some people. You make a great point about more complex languages abstracting patterns themselves, but I think you could go further and look at frameworks like Rails and Cake. Although the languages might not abstract the patterns, the frameworks do, and in many cases to an extent that the developer need not even see the pattern in order to effectively use it - just like your great example about procedure calls in assembly. Great article.