CincomSmalltalkWiki: Quick definition of Software Patterns

The best description I've seen of the concept of Software Patterns is in chapter 2 of Kent Beck's Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns. If you don't have a copy of this book, get it. There are many Smalltalk books out there, this is the only one on my "must have" book list.

You can get the book from bn.com.

All disciplines have patterns in what they do. Time after time you begin to see that this piece of code ends up looking a lot like that other piece of code you wrote last year.

That's a pattern.

Sometimes you'll be describing something you've written or read and someone else will say "that's just like such and so that we did on the XYZ project."

That's a pattern.

The value of patterns, and pattern recognition, is that you can work with patterns at a higher conceptual level. They also provide a useful shorthand when communicating with other programmers and designers. They become the building blocks that you use to create bigger and better systems.

My first pattern was the implementation of writing page headers in my first professional programming job. It was a minor thing, but it was a start, and it wasn't even in an OO environment :)

Back to Troy's Smalltalk Quickstart Notes.