Design patterns are to software development what McDonald's is to cooking

I remember reading the GoF design patterns book and thinking gosh, this is really good stuff. Now I can write program like a real master! I liked the whole idea so much that I went on reading the xUnit Patterns book, and a few more like Refactoring to Patterns.

Looking back on these books now and what I learned from them, I realize that it's not the patterns described in the books that I value the most. It's the reason for their existents; the motivation for using them. For example, the Factory pattern exists because it's often desirable to separate object construction from domain logic. Why? Because it reduces coupling, which means code are easier to enhance, reuse, extend, and test. So when you understand why a pattern exists, then you know when to use and when not to use it.

The problem is that you don't need to understand why a design pattern is needed in order to use a design pattern in you code. Code with a misused design pattern is worse than code without that pattern. As an example, here is some code taken basically directly from an application I worked with:

Thing t = new ThingFactory().create(arg);

with ThingFactory defined as

class ThingFactory {
  Thing create(int arg) { return new Thing(arg); }
}

This is a prime example of code that misuses a design pattern. Clearly, (s)he who wrote this code did not understanding why and when a Factory should be used, (s)he simply used used a Factory without thinking. Probably because (s)he just read some fancy-named design-pattern book.

This is one big problem I see with design patterns. It makes it easy to write code that looks good and professional, when in fact it's horribly bad and convoluted. The Design Patterns book is the software equivalent to MacDonald's Big Book of Burgers: you need to be a good cook/developer already in order to learn anything that will actually make you burgers/software skills better. A less-than-good cook/developer will only learn how to make burgers/software that look good on the surface.

I recently read Object-Oriented Design Heuristics by Arthur J. Riel, and I must say that this book is much better than the Design Patterns book. First of all, it more than just a dictionary of patterns, it's actually a proper book you can read (without being bored to death). Second, the design rules (what the author calls "heuristics") are much more deep and applicable than design patterns. These rules are like Maxwell's equations for good software design. Understand and apply them, and your software will be well designed.

Let me illustrate with an example how I think Riel is different from GoF. Where GoF say "this is a hammer, use it on nails", Riel says "to attach to wooden objects you can either use hammer+nails or screwdriver+screws, both has pros and cons." Sure GoF is easier to read and you'll learn some fancy word you can say if you running out of buzz-words, but Riel actually makes you understand. Understanding is underrated.


But let's give the GoF book et. al, some slack. To be honest I actually did learn something useful and important from those books, and I couldn't do my daily programming work properly without that knowledge:

• favor composition over inheritance,
• separating construction logic from domain logic, and
• code towards an interface, not an implementation.

To me, these three ideas are the essence of most design pattern that are worth knowing and if you keep those three ideas in you head all the time you won't screw up to much.

Oh, there is actually one more idea you should keep in your head or you will definitely screw up big time (literately).

But of course there is one more important thing about knowing design patterns. It helps you communicating with your colleagues. Design patterns defines a pattern language, so instead of saying "...you know that class that instantiates a bunch of classes an connects them..."you can say "...you know that builder class...". Honestly, for me this language is way more important than the patterns themselves.

Actually, there is one thing that I learned from all those design-patterns books (not including Riel). They taught me something important that I could only have learned from few other places: I learned that if an author tries hard enough, (s)he can write a 500 pages book consisting of some common sense and two or three good ideas repeated over and over again. The xUnit Patterns book is the prime example of this. Don't read it. Read Riel.