Damien takes the occasion of the 2005 Programming Languages Achievement Award to exclaim, “the whole design patterns thing is an over-hyped crock of shit.”

I respectfully disagree, except with maybe the “over-hyped” bit. If you look back at the 50 years or so we have of programming language history, and indeed, the 75 years or so of computer science, a large part of it has been concerned with naming and then studying ever-larger units of computation.

Before Fortran, people wrote programs in assembler. Fortran’s innovation was to say, “If you look at assembler code, there are chunks of instructions in there that are really units. Let’s call those things statements, and make it possible for you to talk about statements instead of instructions.” That was a big step forward.

Algol and its ilk said, “There are chunks of statements that really should be isolated as a new unit, let’s call them functions.” (I know: Fortran had functions, but it didn’t get them the way that Algol got them.)

Simula and Smalltalk said, “There are chunks of functions and variables that really should be considered as a unit, let’s call them classes.” And so on.

To the cynics of the time, none of these steps was particularly interesting. People still write C code where “object-oriented” means a structure and a collection of functions which take a structure pointer as the first argument. They were doing that before OO was big, and they’re doing it now. That doesn’t mean that object-oriented programming (whatever it means to you) wasn’t an important step forward.

Heck, there are people that think Fortran’s innovation of writing statements was no big deal. But most of us agree that it was.

The Design Patterns insight was that collections of classes, and especially the way they interact, are new units that deserve names so we can talk about them explicitly. Is this earth shattering? No, but it can be powerful, and not just because it gives us a shorthand in design meetings. Seeing the interaction between classes as a phenomenon deserving of terminology is an important idea for people designing software. Sure, people have been getting classes to interact for decades, how else would software work? But recognizing this level of system design, and creating a language for thinking about it, reasoning about it, and discussing it, is a big step forward.

Of course, patterns can be ridiculed, and of course, some people will earnestly credit them with solving world hunger, or something equally ludicrous. Just because something is over-hyped doesn’t mean it is unworthy of praise.

I say, “Congratulations and well done” to Gamma, Helm, Johnson, and Vlissides.