TITLE: Software Patterns Are Still For Humans AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: June 30, 2015 2:39 PM DESC: ----- BODY: I recently found myself reading a few of Gregor Hohpe's blog posts and came across Design Patterns: More Than Meets The Eye. In it, Hohpe repeats a message that needs to be repeated every so often even now, twenty years after the publication of the GoF book: software patterns are fundamentally about human communication:

The primary purpose of patterns is to help humans understand design problems. Solving design problems is generally much more difficult than typing in some code, so patterns have enormous value in themselves. Patterns owe their popularity to this value. A better hammer can help speed up the construction of a bed, but a pattern helps us place the bed in a way that makes us feel comfortable.

The last sentence of that paragraph is marvelous. Hohpe published that piece five and a half years ago. People who write or teach software patterns will find themselves telling a similar story and answering questions like the ones that motivated his post all the time. Earlier this year, Avdi Grimm wrote a like-minded piece, Patterns are for People, in which he took his shot at dispelling misunderstandings from colleagues and friends:

There's a meme, originating from certain corners of the Functional side of programming, that "patterns are a language smell". The implication being that "good" languages either already encode the patterns as language features, or they provide the tools to extend the language such that modeling the pattern explicitly isn't needed. This misses the point on rather a lot of levels.

Design patterns that are akin to hammers for making better code are plentiful and often quite helpful. But we need more software patterns that help us place our beds in ways that increase human comfort. -----