alt Hacker NewsWildly controversial!
I look at OOP Patterns as standards and practices.
The same way we have building codes for staircases the framing of walls and electrical installations to prevent injury or collapse or fire.
Sure, you can dodge a lot of design pattern paradigms and still make a working application that makes money. You can also invent your own system when building your house and maybe nothing bad will happen. That tragedy hasn’t yet struck does not make the building codes bad just because you got away with it.
Replies
Design Patterns is more like the Human Factors and Ergonomics Handbook.
You can have your building engineered, in which case building walls out of 2x6's 16 inches on center is not off the table, but neither is a mortise and tenon timber frame with partition walls. In that paradigm, the code tries not to be descriptive of an exact technique but only gives you criteria to satisfy. For example you could run all of your electrical wiring on the outside of the walls or on the outside of the building, and you could use ramps instead of staircases. It only talks about ingress and egress for fire safety, and it explains how you're supposed to encase wires, or if wires are not encased it describes the way the wiring must be sheathed to protect the occupants.
You can heat your house entirely with an open fire, and the code speaks to how to do that safely. So it's unlike "design patterns" in a lot of ways in that the code tries to accommodate the kinds of buildings we try to build and the ways in which we modify buildings because that's easier than saying "these are all the allowed ways of building an entry staircase." Design Patterns are more in the latter category.
A decent chunk of OOP patterns was due to lack of language features, notably passing and returning functions