Emergent Design: The Evolutionary Nature of Professional Software Development

Chapter 5. Using and Discovering Patterns

I guess it’s obvious by now that I think patterns are largely misunderstood.

People are interested in patterns, but even after studying them extensively, they tend to misuse them, then overuse them, and eventually stop using them. For a long time, I struggled with this myself. In fact, I was teaching them and still I could not point to any significant advantage they were giving me in actual practice.

Furthermore, when I had the occasional opportunity to meet a former student in my role as a consultant, I would practically never see that patterns were showing up in the code they had written since taking my class. “Great class!” they would say, and then proceed to show me designs they had settled on that ...