Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by pohl | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

pohl·

As Peter Norvig argued, design patterns are bug reports against your programming language.

Does anybody know what the actual quote is? I love this.

View on HN

There was a link: http://www.norvig.com/design-patterns/

I think you are looking for an exact quote but the link is to slides of a talk :(

I also agree with the sentiment, but you Architecture Astronaut will no doubt disagree.

You really can't just take a design pattern and apply it blindly across languages. I spend far too much of my time on a C# application where I have to deconstruct anti-patterns and make them more amenable to change.

Yeah, I've shared that sentiment for a while now, but it was the turn of phrase that pulled me in, and I wanted to know whether to attribute it to Peter or Brendan.

I turned that particular phrase based on Peter Norvig's old Harlequin-era talk.

I've also heard people say that "design patterns are feature requests", or "the kindest form of feature request", but bug or feature -- what's the difference?

/be

Check out the following

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_design_pattern#Critici...

Also http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AreDesignPatternsMissingLanguageFeatu...

and http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DesignPatternsInDynamicProgramming

An aside, but I like this series of articles on design patterns in Perl, first here:

http://www.perl.com/pub/2003/06/13/design1.html

"If a pattern is really valuable, then it should be part of the core language"

You know I was also thinking in Perl yesterday when I read this and this is definitely a Perl idiom.

I really believe you get a lot better at seeing the benefits of patterns when you try to apply them in different languages and different contexts.

Are patterns something we should try to transcend in our learning? Meaning, you really do need to know them before you understand how to dismiss them in favor of something else?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com