(e-mail address removed) says...
Arne said:
Gene Wirchenko wrote:
With the amount of noise over patterns though, you would think
that many people need the patterns. For me, supporting an in-house
application, there is no or little need.
Or you have not realized the need.
Or both of you are looking at it from the wrong perspective.
[..]
The argument is over "patterns" in the GoF sense, a highly bureaucratized,
overly-verbose and religiously canonical set of labels and formats to describe
them. But even amidst all the sturm und drang over the latter kind of
patterns, they provide value in a common terminology and informal use. So when
we discuss Visitor or Singleton, we all know what we mean. ("We" being
competent programmers. One occasionally sees posters here who are less
knowledgeable.)
I guess that's one of the most common misconceptions. Some people seem
to think that patterns are used, because they are considered cool and
fancy. While in the real world you use any certain pattern because and
only when it solves your problem.
I have seldomly seen a visitor pattern in the wild, because there are
not so many occasions where it's so considerably better than something
that is easier to understand to make it worth using.
But the strategy pattern is used everywhere, everytime you use a
Comparator for example, simply because it solves a very common problem
very well.