Re:The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow
by DonaldFisk on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @09:52AM
(#13598586)
That's very interesting. I haven't read Design Patterns. I have read A Pattern Language, and the Timeless Way of Building, by Christopher Alexander, and Patterns of Software by Richard Gabriel. It's been my understanding that Design Patterns had only a couple of dozen patterns (which turn up again and again in Java code) and prescribed their use generally, but if they're only examples of patterns, and programmers are encouraged to invent their own (which I do anyway), it might be worth a read.
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Re:The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow
by munificent on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @11:43AM
(#13599642)
> which turn up again and again in Java code
This is true, but it's an effect, not a cause of the book. "Design Patterns" is older than Java. They wrote it based on patterns they saw mainly in Smalltalk and C++.
> prescribed their use generally
Like "A Pattern Language", "Design Patterns" reads more descriptively than prescriptively. It's, "Here's a thing we saw people do. Here's what problem they were solving with it. Here's the context of their problem. Here's the positive and negative consequences."
Re:The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow
by the_af on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @10:40AM
(#13599045)
GoF's Design Patterns, for all its flaws, was never intended as a prescription or even as an exhaustive description of every design pattern. It was a recording of commonly used and battle-tested patterns. I think the motivation was good; the bad thing was that it became some sort of bible to be followed blindly. I don't think that was the intention of the authors, though.