[voltooid]

Your comment is very interesting. I recently took a course on Design Patterns. I sat squirming during the lectures because I didn't like what was being said, but couldn't put my finger on what exactly I disliked.

What I understand from your comment is that you dislike the Gang of four book because it renames concepts that don't need the cutesy names that they give them. Do you have a problem with the _concept_ of design patterns? Or just the names they are given? Are the concepts themselves sound and worth paying attention to?

[fsloth]

I wrote a long rant as a response to another comment above. To quote myself:

"It reads like it was written by a clever, verbose, and 'over-eager novice."

Design patterns are a really usefull concept. The GoF book just totally botches up that concept by dwelving deep in trivial language details while missing the big picture.

Christopher Alexander's "A timeless way of building", and "Notes on the Synthesis of Form" are the books in architecture that prompted a lot of dicussion in software design circles, and from which I presume GoF got their idea of software design patterns.

What are good design patterns in software? IMO they are composed from the programming models exposed in a basic CS book like Aho and Ullman's "Foundations of Computer Science" and further developed in a books like Structure And Intrepretation of Computer Programs.

GoF is an ok anecdotal reference after those, but it really is not suitable as a didactic resource.

Peter Norvig wryly commented that 16 of the 23 pattern are either invisible or non-existent in lisp Lisp[0].

[0] http://www.norvig.com/design-patterns/design-patterns.pdf

[reacweb]

I do not like the GOF book. Some of the patterns appears sometimes in my code, but the book has never helped me to program better or helped me to think about my code. The single benefit I got from this book is that it gaves me words to explain my code to other people.

[beaconstudios]

your instinctual reaction against design patterns because you may have realised that design patterns are patches over flaws in the programming language's design - they're a terrible basis to build an architecture on. There's some discussion on this idea at the C2 wiki: http://wiki.c2.com/?AreDesignPatternsMissingLanguageFeatures