they say the two hardest things in software development is 1) naming things, 2) cache invalidation and 3) off by one bugs.
Amazon sells a product: amazon web services.
What is it?
It’s a bunch of software you can pay to use.
Google sells a product: google cloud platform.
What is it?
A bunch of software you can pay to use.
Microsoft sells a product: azure.
What is it?
A color.
I’ve been writing software for 40 years now, and I’ve seen a lot of things come and go. But I’ve noticed a trend towards the need to name things.
In the good old days, we used to write software. We wrote functions that did things, and we strung them together into programs.
Now we actually have a name for the fact that we need to name everything: “Patterns.”
A pattern isn’t an algorithm, it’s a word to explain that we categorize our algorithms.
So there’s the this pattern, and the that pattern, and because people can’t just say “well, that’s not a good idea.” they instead had to name that concept and call it an anti-pattern.
I think it’s all a bit silly and a waste of time given how hard it is to name things in the first place.