Design patterns in Game Development: religion or tool?

[In response to Me: "I think you're imagining how you'd like it to work"]

I don't think you know "Design Patterns" is a specific term. Maybe it's a translation problem. I think you're purposely writing about general software design. That's fine. Except when someone mentions something specific from Design Patterns, I don't think you don't know they are, and reply inappropriately.

My point here is to prevent a future reader from getting the wrong impression - that they should delve into Design Pattern literature. There may be lots of useful insights in this thread. But, so far, NONE OF THEM ARE DESIGN PATTERNS.

 

Design principles and patterns are a tool for software design. If you extract a part of a class to a new component you are doing composition over inheritance regardless of what you think about design principles

 

Maybe there is a translation problem? I'm quite well aware of what a design pattern is. I'm also quite well aware that much of what's discussed in this thread is general design rather than patterns in particular.

 

There's a 1994 book "Design Patterns: elements of reusable object-oriented software". That's the first use of the term, and for about 15 years the official definition of Design Pattern was the exact techniques in the book, using the exact names they gave them, with the exact awkward syntax. Java-coders embraced that book like a religion, later C# business coders. If one were to, quoting AndersM "extract a part of a class to a new component [...] doing composition over inheritance", they'd be asked to explain which of the 25 Design Patterns it was (none yet, but could be part of Bridge or Composite, I think).

Language changes. Searching for "Design Patterns" will get you a few paragraphs about reusable high-level organization techniques. But mostly you'll find discussions about how to classify and use those exact tricks, like "is this code using Factory or Abstract Factory?" As human language, IMHO, Design Patterns 80% still means changing your program to fit better into categories from that book.

 

Well, they call them "The Gang of Four", this was their hell of a drive-by shooting.