It's really interesting to hear the opinion that following patterns religiously can also lead to "bad" code.The thing to remember about patterns is that they're meant to be descriptive (a way of communicating what you're doing to other programmers) rather than prescriptive (a way of telling you what you should do). Bad code frequently results when you take a list of patterns and decide to use them purely because they've been blessed as Patterns(TM) rather than analyzing your problem, looking to see the most appropriate way to solve it, and then using patterns to express that solution.
There's also the side issue that patterns are generally ways of filling gaps in the language that you're using (Perl has no patterns for finding text which has certain characteristics within a string because the language's built-in regex support is better than anything you're likely to write in your application code), so problems also arise from inappropriately applying one language's patterns in another language which has a better way of solving the problem at hand, but that seems to be a less common cause of pattern-derived bad code.
In reply to Re^2: Programming patterns
by dsheroh
in thread Programming patterns
by McA
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