Disclaimer: this is an opinionated article, flowing directly from brain to keyboard without lots of references and explanations. I know much of its content is debatable and it just reflects my current opinions and mindset, likely to change without notice.

Recently I watched the Design Patterns Coursera course (https://www.coursera.org/learn/design-patterns) and noticed that it’s full of Gang of Four (GoF) design patterns. If you are a programmer reading about programming online, you’ll find that discussions and material on GoF has been very sparse in the recent years, especially with the uprising functional programming hype (if we can call it a hype).

I wondered about this and a bit of investigation led me to (mostly) the following opinions:

  1. GoF patterns are now common knowledge and therefore nobody talks about it anymore, just like nobody talks about using functions or control structures anymore.
  2. They were a fail, born in the object-oriented-Java-mindset, made software even more complex and went overboard with useless abstractions.
  3. They were there to help with programming language shortcomings which are less and less of in issue now, especially with functional features entering existing languages.

So, was OOP a fail? Will functional programming save us? Are strapped-on design patterns useless and replaced by simpler language features? How did we get to the current situation, where will we and up?

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