Dr. Philip Johnson says, “Patterns help newbies acquire the hard-won experience of ninjas”. I, a current newbie, would like to thank these ninjas for setting the foundations for the design patterns that we use today. The 1994 book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, also known as Gang of For (GoF) book for short, was created to provide a resource that defines and explains numerous design patterns that are used in object-oriented programming. Although this book was written years ago, a lot of the information within the book are still very relevant to today.
Design patterns are general solutions that can be modified and adapted to solve a problem or to achieve a goal within a program. Since problems or challenges are diverse, it is useful to have defined patterns that have been discovered by these experienced ninjas that allow us solve them.
As mentioned earlier, I would consider myself a newbie in using these design patterns in software engineering. Most projects I’ve created were not really following any type of design patterns. Even if my programs did contain a use of some design patterns, it was unbeknowst to me. Luckily, this class has made me aware of design patterns, and how there are many different types of patterns that can be used to design a program.
Due to the tools we use for this class, I have been introduced to multiple different design patterns. Some of the main ones are Prototype, Observer, Model-View-Controller (MVC), and Front Controller. These design patterns are used in the tech stack we are using to create applications.
By being more aware of these design patterns and researching their applications in object-oriented programming, I can hopefully learn to implement them into my projects correctly, effectively, and creatively. I hope to one day master them so I can also call myself.. a ninja.