Why use patterns?

Patterns help you learn from other’s successes, instead of your own failures

Mark Johnson (cited by B. Eckel)

An additional layer of abstraction

• separate things that change from things that stay the same
• distilling out common factors between a family of similar problems
• similar to design

Insightful and clever way to solve a particular class of problems

• most general and flexible solution

Algorithmic form of patterns

IF   you find yourself in CONTEXT

     for example EXAMPLES,

     with PROBLEM,

     entailing FORCES

THEN for some REASONS,

     apply DESIGN FORM AND/OR RULE

     to construct SOLUTION

     leading to NEW CONTEXT and

                OTHER PATTERNS