It's what the book /says/, but in practice it's not what the book /encourages/: a bit like alcohol or sports car TV ads, which all say "drink/drive responsibly". Your own introduction suggests patterns as a cure for bad design and architecture:
"I started trying to find books about how to organize programs. Fast-forward several years and a friend hands me a new book: Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Finally! The book I’d been looking for since I was a teenager."
"But the architecture that this brilliant code hung from was often an afterthought. [...] if they ever cracked open Design Patterns at all, never got past Singleton."
I'm sure most cases of badly architected code you have ran into were caused by insufficient time and/or attention devoted to design and architecture. Now the question is, do you think if these coders had the same time/attention but knew patterns, the result would be better? How would it compare to these same coders without patterns but with more time/attention?
In that sense, metaphor alert a book of design patterns is to programming what a dictionary is to writing: useful, but mostly orthogonal to the quality of the output.
> I'm sure most cases of badly architected code you have ran into were caused by insufficient time and/or attention devoted to design and architecture. Now the question is, do you think if these coders had the same time/attention but knew patterns, the result would be better?
Yes, I do. I've seen a number of times where a smart developer burned hours half-way reinventing from scratch some crude architectural pattern that they could have spent five minutes looking up in a book. Worse, if they had looked it up, they may have learned some of the documented pitfalls that come with it instead of stumbling right into them.
I agree there are few things worse than a codebase jam-packed with inappropriate design patterns. Unfortunately, one of the few things that is worse is a code base where the programmers have clearly never learned about any design patterns at all.
"I started trying to find books about how to organize programs. Fast-forward several years and a friend hands me a new book: Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Finally! The book I’d been looking for since I was a teenager."
"But the architecture that this brilliant code hung from was often an afterthought. [...] if they ever cracked open Design Patterns at all, never got past Singleton."
I'm sure most cases of badly architected code you have ran into were caused by insufficient time and/or attention devoted to design and architecture. Now the question is, do you think if these coders had the same time/attention but knew patterns, the result would be better? How would it compare to these same coders without patterns but with more time/attention?
In that sense, metaphor alert a book of design patterns is to programming what a dictionary is to writing: useful, but mostly orthogonal to the quality of the output.