[poulsbohemian]

While the GoF book has perhaps not aged well and led to a lot of misguided ideas, it also did something that was a good idea and could have been developed further: a common nomenclature for things we’d all seen and needed to be able to describe to peers. To my thinking, the reuse of patterns to solve specific problems is along the path to turning programming into a discipline of software engineering

[hinkley]

I told my last mentee to “read ‘Refactoring’ twice instead”.

GoF tells you What. ‘Refactoring’ tells you Why, and gives some pointers on How. In any field, if you know the why and the how of something, and the what doesn’t work itself out? Then you’re in the wrong field.

(He’s gotten promoted twice since we parted ways. He’ll be just fine.)