Ask HN: Are design patterns still a thing? When I learned C++ 10 years ago, we had a textbook basically teaching C++ through design patterns. I remember them to be mentioned quite regularly, including in job offers. Nowadays, they don't seem as big as they used to be, and I did not hear about them for a while.
What is your recent experience with them? Are they still a thing? |
In a sense, design patterns are everywhere. Some easy examples: each time you use a foreach, you are using the iterator pattern. If you use filter or Where on a collection, you are using a visitor pattern implementation.
I would add that people are coming to realize that SOLID principles lead to code that is easier to write, reason about, and maintain. Whereas the GoF patterns were the right knowledge 10 years ago, SOLID principles are the right knowledge for today.
It's a bit odd, to teach a language through design patterns: design patterns are really best-practice workarounds beyond the language where the standard language toolkit doesn't provide an obviously best way of solving a problem. It's a run-before-walk approach.
You might be interested in this story, Design Patterns 15 Years On - http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3655 (link to LtU discussion, which has some other resources).
Now I mostly wonder why/how did they get so big.