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Comment by eddsh | Hacker News Reader

Don't listen too closely to the issues people have with GoF and Design Patterns. Yes, they have their issues and an over-reliance is an issue. However as a junior engineer you should learn these things and come to this realization (or not) yourself! Also if your company does use these things, code standardization across the org is more important than the downfalls of overly complex patterns.

I read these arguments instead of focusing on learning patterns and it just caused grief until I decided to learn the patterns.

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> However as a junior engineer you should learn these things and come to this realization (or not) yourself!

This is such great advice. Wonder if theres even something in there about how learning through experience why something doesn't work being as useful as learning it in the first place.

I do think we throw the baby out with the bath water with many ideas. Despite us learning useful skills subconsciously.

Thank you for the response.

Yes I intend to learn and integrate design patterns and OO programming in general so that I can gain some confidence, and maybe later I can finally understand why my software development professor teachers hated this so much and teached us Haskell and Clojure instead :-)

If you're anything like me, given enough time you wonder if all the 'fluff' of OO is necessary as you seem to be writing code to satisfy the programming style rather than the domain problem. You'll then try FP and find it has its own pitfalls - especially around how complex the code can get if you have a load of smart Haskell engineers - and suddenly they have the same problems ('fluff'). Apparently at some point I'll have a similar move to Lisp and discover how complex the code base can be with multiple engineers (I'm 8 or 9 years into this engineering journey myself!).

My current goal with software is to write this as simply as possible that a junior developer with 6 months experience could read my code and know how to modify it.

Agree with the GP. In a sense even if design patterns are not such a great idea, there's so much code written with those patterns in mind (and classes/variables named accordingly) that it's beneficial to understand at least briefly what the names mean.

(That said, quoting Wikipedia, which I agree with also: "A primary criticism of Design Patterns is that its patterns are simply workarounds for missing features in C++". In particular, these days with more modern languages [and also the modernization of C++] some of the workarounds aren't that important any more)

As for why your professors prefer Haskell and Clojure... for some reason functional programming aligns with the way the stereotypical academia type person thinks. In practice, you should be using the best tool for the task, and learning various aspects of software engineering (as opposed to taking a side) should help you in the long run.

What often happens is you never get to "code standardization across the org" because technology changes too fast. But you still have to deal with overly complex patterns, varying and mis-applied patterns, etc.

Oh I 100% agree but as a junior engineer you're not going to be able to change that, if you can change it you probably won't change it for the better, and using HN comments to fuel debates over long-standing patterns will just cause resentment. These are totally valid opinions to have once you find them out for yourself, IMO.

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