Street Coder

3 Useful anti-patterns

This chapter covers

• Known bad practices that can be put to good use
• Anti-patterns that are, in fact, useful
• Identifying when to use a best practice versus its evil twin

Programming literature is full of best practices and design patterns. Some of them even seem indisputable and provoke people to give you the side-eye if you argue about them. They eventually turn into dogmas and are rarely questioned. Once in a while, someone writes a blog post about one, and if their article gets the approval of the Hacker News¹ community, it can be accepted as valid criticism and can open a door for new ideas. Otherwise, you can’t even discuss them. If I had to send a single message to the world of programming, it would be to question ...