Subject: Re: Design patterns as a weapon
From: root <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1999/11/29
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3152894135590750@naggum.no>

* Michael Schuerig
| The most important thing about a pattern is that it gives you guidance
| when to apply it.  A language feature does not do that.

  this whole argument is getting rather bizarre in my view.  it seems that
  you attribute to these "patterns" the entire culture of good programming
  practice, and refuse to acknowledge that good programming practice can
  even exist without patterns.  it's like the joke about Freudians: if you
  deny having an Oedipus complex, you're even worse off, because then you
  suffer from _suppressing_ your Oedipus complex.  however, nobody here
  appears to be denying the value of patterns, just the exclusionary point
  that everything else that has value must also be patterns, and that if it
  isn't a pattern, then it lacks goodness in some fundamental sense.  in
  this particular case, consider a textbook and a community of programmers
  who tell their students and new members how to use a langauge feature.
  some would say "ah!  pattern!  I knew it!" while others will argue that
  _teaching_ and _apprenticeship_ are hardly worth patternizing since they
  are already well-established processes and concepts.

  I think it's worth our while to identify certain commonalities in what
  good programmers do when they write good software, but there is a very
  real danger in making everything explicit and spending time talking about
  it: we lose track of its proportions and relevance, and the more we talk
  about one thing to the exclusion of other things, the more we try to tie
  that thing into everything else through the most dubious of connections
  that would be seen as obviously wrong to anyone who had not focused so
  heavily on that particular thing.  this is why it's vital to a healthy
  mind constantly to seek and examine information that runs counter to its
  established ideas and concepts.  only that way can a person maintain the
  crucial psychological belief that what one does believe is superior to
  what one does not or no longer believe.  the alternative is fanaticism.

#:Erik