Hey GOF, It's not a good metaphor unless you can drop it on your foot
I read a recent article about the importance of writing physically . Fundamentally, the author says that "writing physically" means writing about things you can drop on your foot. This means a lot to me because when trying to write software, I'm constantly translating ideas into mental pictures of physical things. To this end, I think the Gang of Four have done a disservice to the software industry by pushing design patterns that have no representation in the real world. Worse than this, pushing UML as a way to represent and communicate software design leads to situations where everybody THINKS they agree, but they in fact all are thinking about completely different things. As a specific and very simple example, lets look at the Command pattern. Reading the explanation is very dense and rife with jargon that is specific to the particulars of Object Oriented programming languages. For folks who need to read the explanation, who typically are new to OO programmin...