note Voronich Strictly speaking, I can't disagree with you at all. Patternitis has (or had, it may have blown over by now) become a serious problem in dev shops. I'm primarily a C++ weenie. People call me a "senior" programmer, but whatever. I've got a couple people working with me and they LOVE nothing more than to show me how nice all their pattern usage is.<p>But I have to say I've eaten up all the DP books and papers I could, finding that they're delightful keys to large-scale design and even small scale when I know I'm looking at boilerplate structure that 'smells' reusable even though it doesn't look it (even though most of them are pedantic pieces of crap.) Usually I can look around and re-browse through pattern catalogs until I see someone who's rephrased my problem. So I can't sell it short.<p> The DP thing in general seems to me to show that there is a certain critical mass in code size, after which you need to really think deeply about higher-order structural organization and does so by demonstration rather than just saying "reduce, reuse, recycle" over and over again.<p>BUT, there are people floating around the DP mailing lists who believe that every single line of code should be a part of a pattern and that a project should be able to be described completely in terms of patterns. (These are people who seem to spend a great deal more time writing papers than designing systems.) And it never ceases to amaze me how hard people will try to MAKE their code fir into a pattern. (This is regrettably true whether the coder is a newly formed DP convert or not.)<p> Design Patterns: A force so great it can only be used for Good or Evil. 133399 133399