Revisiting the Visitor: the Just Do It Pattern
Type
Event
Journal of Universal Computer Science
Date
Jan 28, 2010
Abstract
While software design patterns are a generally useful concept, they are
often (and mistakenly) seen as ready-made universal recipes for solving
common problems. In a way, the danger is that programmers stop thinking
about their actual problem, and start looking for pre-cooked solutions in
some design pattern book instead. What people usually forget about design
patterns is that the underlying programming language plays a major role in
the exact shape such or such pattern will have on the surface. The purpose
of this paper is twofold: we show why design pattern expression is
intimately linked to the expressiveness of the programming language in use,
and we also demonstrate how a blind application of them can in fact lead to
very poorly designed code.