Hi Marcel et al,

It is interesting that you should write about patterns in this way.

I was reading some 'propaganda' about Lisp some time ago on Paul 
Graham's web site and the following quote really made me sit up and 
take notice:
"When I see patterns in my programs, I consider it a sign of trouble. 
The shape of a program should reflect only the problem it needs to 
solve. Any other regularity in the code is a sign, to me at least, that 
I'm using abstractions that aren't powerful enough-- often that I'm 
generating by hand the expansions of some macro that I need to write."

(The whole article can be found at: 
http://store.yahoo.com/paulgraham/icad.html)

This is very similar to the way you describe it and I can't help but 
come to the conclusion that "patterns" is taking programming down the 
wrong path!


Regards,

Karl



On Sunday, Dec 1, 2002, at 20:52 Australia/Tasmania, Marcel Weiher 
wrote:

> Yes!  IMHO, ALL patterns are like this.  Think of it:  why should 
> there be repeating patterns of code in our programs?  There shouldn't 
> be!  If there is a "pattern", we should be able to somehow express the 
> pattern and encapsulate it.  "Once and Only Once".
>
> So I consider a pattern a bug.  Not a bug in the program, but a bug in 
> the programming language.  Or let's call it a shortcoming, because the 
> language cannot encode this pattern in a way that I can put it in a 
> library and forget about it.  I think the fact that many patterns 
> necessary in a primitive language ( C++, Java ) are not necessary for 
> their more advanced predecessor (Smalltalk) supports this point of 
> view.  However, we shouldn't be too smug:  the Smalltalk Pattern 
> Companion is not empty.  In an ideal world / programming language, 
> there would be no patterns books.
>
> There is some reason to believe that such an ideal world may be even 
> theoretically impossible, or at least impractical, but that doesn't 
> mean we shouldn't treat patterns as indicators of something being 
> wrong.
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