| You're playing semantic games. If we accept your terms, we're adopting the GoF patterns any time we use "method_missing". You're also arguing with a straw man. The original idea behind the "Design Patterns movement" was to provide a common language for describing recurring concepts in software design. It's the same idea behind Alexander's "A Pattern Language", which is something else you should read. Nobody is arguing that describing things a little more rigorously is bad. But a lot of people have problems with the way "engineers" and "architects" abuse the pattern concept. Alexander did not write a book that claimed you could build an entire city by picking out a "44. Local Town Hall" and mixing it with a "69. Public Outdoor Room". He had an idea, that the cart was dragging the horse in architecture, and attempted to use vocabulary to reframe the discussion about why specific choices were being made. The Gang of Four introduced a minor corruption in that approach --- they had no fundamental thesis about how software should be designed, only a notion that there was folkloric knowledge that should be captured and named --- but their followers completed the corruption wholeheartedly. Instead of a language describing software, the GoF patterns became a perscription for building it. And so we have Ruby code that includes a "singleton" module into classes, and SOAP4R code that includes "factory" classes (note again how ruby already transparently supports the abstract factory concept), and people argung that we should start "doing a little engineering" by pulling these clumsy ideas back off the shelf. I can't argue this any better than Norvig can. In fact, I'll invoke him again by suggesting that you don't want to end up like Norvig's "opponent" in the sudoku-solving contet. |