| > Patterns that get "encoded" into the language, or made trivial by abstraction features within the language, are idioms? Yeah, that sounds like a reasonable term to use. > The closest I've come, weirdly, was tutoring a friend through a design pattern class. It's a bit old now, but I think it's probably still worth reading the GoF book - it's clearly written, and much better than most subsequent imitators. In particular, each pattern comes with a "when not to use this" discussion, that more people should pay attention to :-/ > I've always wanted just a simple list of the names, maybe with linked single paragraph descriptions Would http://wiki.c2.com/?CategoryPattern do? > what is the formal name of doing that, specifically, the formal name of the category to which attr_accessor and has_many belong to? I'm not sure. Adding methods to a class at runtime is called "metaprogramming" (which has the more general meaning of "writing code that writes or modifies code"). I don't know of a name for a method that performs metaprogramming, though. |