Musings of a Trained Monkey

Patrick Logan offers an interesting take on the state of design doctrines in his post Code Shrink Programming Models of particular note was this bit:

By the way, the thought crossed my mind again recently… has “agile” killed “patterns” or did it die on its own? Are “patterns” the best way to present a new programming model? Does anyone really “do” patterns anymore, the way the original movement intended? Or do we just write some text and draw some pictures and call them patterns? Is there any point to the “patterns” idea anymore? I’m not sure either way.

This is a beguiling idea as lots of companies look for architecture documentation that explicitly states which patterns were used, etc. Yet I find myself agreeing with Patrick’s post. Good programmers inherently write good code, other programmers attempt to employ patterns to write mediocre code.

I forwarded this article to David Gifford, a friend of mine to get his perspective since he has been working in the industry as an architect for a long time. His response made me laugh for quite awhile.

Frameworks evolve so “lazy” developers don’t have to give much thought to patterns, instead everyone just thinks about all the multitudes of configuration files and should groovy or xml be used…

Anyone working on the web with Java in the pre-Struts days can remember when they didn’t have to make giant configuration files. Now I am wondering if “multitudes of configuration files” is recognized by the community as a pattern or as an anti-pattern? I know what the answer is for me.