Software Development and Professional Practice

C H A P T E R  11

Design Patterns

Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.

— Christopher Alexander¹

Do you reinvent the wheel each time you write code? Do you have to re-learn how to iterate through an array every time you write a program? Do you have to re-invent how to fix a dangling else in every function you write? Do you need to relearn insertion sort or binary search every time you want to use them? Of course not!

Over the time you’ve spent writing programs you’ve learned a set of idioms that you employ whenever you’re writing ...