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I did not mean "everybody has to learn the vocabulary". I meant the opposite, actually: it's fine not to know the word for the tool (I don't enjoy reading about patterns just to learn about patterns, it's not my thing at all).

Say I build a tool that makes it easier for me to drive a nail and call it a "Naildriver". If I show it to a colleague, they may be able to tell me "oh, this is generally called a hammer!". Maybe they will even tell me how I may improve my hammer, because they happen to like to learn about hammers in their free time. Or maybe now that they said it's a known concept, I will enjoy reading about hammers online (doesn't mean I will now read the entire encyclopedia of tools).

The fact that there is a name for the concept ("it's called a hammer") does not say you have to know the word. It's just useful to have a word for it, because then we can reference it in discussions and share knowledge about it more easily.

The other thing that design patterns allow, is to learn pitfalls, applications and other attributes about them.

To keep in your analogy, if you have a 3KG naildriver with a 2m handle you'll quickly find out that driving nails into a drywall with that leaves you with no wall. And that it's a bad idea to use a "Naildriver" to drive these "spiralled-slothead-nails" (aka screws) into wood.

But with a common language, such as design patterns, you can easily learn where they are good, what their limits are, in what cases other patterns fit better, and what pitfalls to avoid and so on.

If I search the web for "why is it so hard for my naildriver to drive in spiralled-slothead-nails" I'll get zero results. But when I search for "why is it hard to hammer in a screw" I'll get good results. May sound like a silly example, but for me that sillyness illustrates how obvious designpatters should be.

I totally agree with that!

And it doesn't mean at all that everybody should learn the whole encyclopedia of tools by heart. But having it formalised somewhere is useful: as soon as someone tells me "what you're trying to do sounds like this design pattern", I can start searching and reading about it.

Of course if that someone tells me "you suck, you should know that there is a design pattern for that because you should read about design patterns every night before you go to sleep", it will be different :-).

I have mixed feelings about this.

I think Julian Assange once said he would refer to things in discussion just as "Tomato" (or similar), in discussion to have a shortcut for something unnamed with some meaning. We do this all day in programming, we give a complex component a name and it means a lot more then just the actual word. The problem is that this specific meaning is often not universal, it's contextual.

If you take a hammer, an integer and design patterns, the latter is the least universal thing. They depend on domain, context and conventions, and can change quite a lot depending on the language. Removing hammers and integers from the world would cause collapse, removing design patterns would do almost nothing.

I guess the active celebration of design patterns as a catalogue of general wisdom is my primary issue here. I'd welcome any project/team/company that maintains a catalogue of their individual "patterns". But a universal source of truth has too much bible flavor to me. (Oh it also dictates OOP by default which renders it's inherent "wisdom" completely useless in many languages)

I feel like we're talking past each other. I tend to agree with you, I don't like having a "bible" and "celebration of design patterns as a catalogue of general wisdom".

But formalising concepts with words makes sense. If your company maintains a catalogue of their patterns, and someone happens to know that this specific pattern is usually called a "singleton", I would find it weird to call it a tomato.

Some patterns have different names in different contexts or languages, and that's fine. I don't find it weird to have a discussion around "in this language there is this pattern that they call X, does that ring a bell for you working on that other language? The idea is [...]", and maybe the answer is "yep we have it too" or "oh, we call that Y, but that's pretty similar".

Well I guess I am not clear enough. Naming stuff is a normal human habit, maybe even why we have language? So we can agree on that, it's helpful. But you say it yourself, a thing is called different in another language, so the thing is bigger then the word. But everyone can handle it better in his own head and in communication with a word for it. I guess my usual grief is that any kind of excessive celebration and ceremony comes down to some kind of brainwash. Which mostly affects newbies and cultists. The article for example isn't overtly critical on singletons, while past design pattern writings often heavily disregarded the use of it. So we don't just always reiterate the good, but also the bad.

I don't mind the celebration and ceremony as long as they don't bother me personally. I wouldn't fight against the existance of a PatternConf, I just wouldn't go :-).

I've had some debates with junior devs who really wanted to enforce their newly-learned patterns, and my experience there is that passed a certain point, there is no convincing anymore: if they really insist about overengineering something with their newly-learned concept and the hierarchy doesn't allow me to prevent them from doing it, anyway they will do it. So instead of fighting I just let them, and if it turns out to be a waste of time in the end... well that's not my problem: I was not in a position to prevent it in the first place.

It's not only patterns though: some juniors have a way to try to use every exciting framework or library or tool they just discovered.

The silly thing is that I've been the same when I started. A high energy kid playing around and celebrating everything fresh and new, with a big ego.

Probably a bad habit trying to stop them, they need to learn walking before they can sprint. The question is always how to put limits on them? I say it's overengineered, they say it's modern code and I am old. So what do you do if they send you a PR that is just plain wrong? I mean it seems like you delay the conflict from upfront design/planning to pull requests.

I have been in two different situations:

* Functional teams (established companies): enough seniors are here to tell the juniors when they are wrong, and the juniors naturally accept the criticism because it's expected in that environment.

* Dysfunctional teams (startups): most devs are juniors anyway, there is no clear hierarchy, managers are still at their first job so they have never seen a functioning team or had a competent manager themselves.

In the second case, there was absolutely no way I could win an argument: the "high energy kids with big egos" never believed me, I was the "old guy" as you mention. I remember an example where the "kid" failed and gave up with their "right" way after 3 months and I solved it in 3 days, exactly how I had suggested they did it in the first place. Next discussion, nothing had changed, they still knew better.

I can't really blame them, because the whole environment was like this. Everybody was always right, knew better, etc, even though it was their first job.

What I've learned is to protect myself and move away from that. Either by changing job, or by changing project. In startups I have been pretty successful at saying "I can help with this project if we do it this way, but if we do it that way, I can't help and I will work on something else". Of course it meant that I could not work on the most exciting project, but they made a mess out of them, so all in all I feel it was better working on my boring, stable, maintainable components.

This is a good point, nowadays I always try to account for human psychology. Like a tool might be a positive in some way but maybe it will have a negative impact on people's morale and it might end up being a negative.

Or some tool makes it easier to write code safely, but in doing so, it encourages people to architect their code in a certain over-complicated way and it ends up being a net negative.

> The truth is that design patterns are at best stagnant in quality and quantity over time (GoF is over 30 years old!), but the quantity and quality of problems is infinite.

I think once you have spent enough time in a software space, nothing is really new under the sun. That's why I think the GoF has aged well (controversial opinion I know!).