Learning JavaScript Design Patterns, 2nd Edition

Chapter 4. Anti-Patterns

As engineers, we may run into situations when we are on a deadline to deliver a solution or where code gets included as a series of patches without a code review. The code in such cases may not always be well thought out and may propagate what we call anti-patterns. This chapter describes what anti-patterns are and why it is essential to understand and identify them. We also look at some typical anti-patterns in JavaScript.

What Are Anti-Patterns?

If a pattern represents a best practice, an anti-pattern represents the lesson learned when a proposed pattern goes wrong. Inspired by the GoF’s book Design Patterns, Andrew Koenig first coined the term anti-pattern in 1995 in his article in the Journal of Object-Oriented Programming, Volume 8. He described anti-patterns as:

An antipattern is just like a pattern, except that instead of a solution, it gives something that looks superficially like a solution but isn’t one.

He presented two notions of anti-patterns. Anti-patterns:

• Describe a bad solution to a particular problem that resulted in an unfavorable situation occurring

• Describe how to get out of the said situation and go to a good solution

On this topic, Alexander writes about the difficulties in achieving a good balance between good design structure and good context:

These notes are about the process of design; the process of inventing physical things which display a new physical order, organization, form, in response to function. … Every design ...