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It's not that the patterns themselves have failed, just that their use has fizzled due to failure to live up to the claimed benefits of using them. I've never actually even read the book, but I took a gander at the "antipatterns" book (only thing in category available at the library at that time) and it immediately struck me as "middle management trying to program", or something in a similar vein.

Now, there's indubitably a lot of "code grinders" Out There for whom this sort of thing is actually a boon. The best and brightest among us tend to scoff at such people, or more specifically at their stumbling and crutches, with all sorts of plausible-sounding but not actually helpful counters like "good people know what their code does", conveniently forgetting that most programmers aren't very good at all. So perhaps "patterns" are a useful crutch to keeping a lid on the damage from the inevitable Dunning-Kruger effects in business programming. I don't know, maybe.

But it was only until very much later that I found this writeup and my take-away is that this sort of thing, I think including touting lists of "patterns" as fix-alls for programming trouble, are attempts at taking an inherently mapping mode thing into something suitable for packers to use. The better approach is to knock such people into mapping mode, but that's much harder to sustain. And could well count as cruel and unusual.

I want something in the middle, ability to think at a low level and get stuff done efficiently but also able to use the obvious abstractions that makes code easy to change and adapt in the future.

You can't have that. People with a varied skillset look weak in any particular area to recruiters.

You're right though, just the right mix of layering and abstraction with practical code getting the work done, nicely cut up in parts by general function, and code written in response to an emerged need for it, not the "we'll write it just in case because the logic of the framework demands it" fluff code. It's one of those things I've been thinking off and on again about for years, because, well, it interests me. I can just feel there should be a logic to it, but how to express it?

And no, a "methodology" is just about guaranteed to not be the right vehicle to express it, though it might be the usual vehicle attempted.

Me, I could do damn near everything from laying cables to running the sysadmin shop, likewise programming from assembler to quite on high (though not GUI, never GUI), but I don't have a job and I probably never will again. If I didn't get rejected for the big large gaps in employment from a burn-out 12 years ago, I'd still get rejected with fibs, as a wide skillset also tends to not imply that "smell of success" that is the only thing most "tech" recruiters know how to select on. And then there's the government requiring me to have paperwork it refuses to issue me when asked though by rights they cannot refuse me. None of that ought to be my core business, yet perforce battling idiocy for no pay is all there is for me. This is about the worst possible jobmatch for me, and it shows. Thanks, recruiters, thanks, officials.

These are but a few of the reasons, and minor ones at that (the major ones don't deal with me specifically, TYVM) that I think we need better people selection.

Programming is an expressive medium. It is not an art form in itself, any more than prose is per se. Both are media in which many things can take place, including education, instruction, conversation, function, and art. I personally lean very much towards using both of these media in an intensely practical manner, with no concern at all for artistic aesthetics. But I can appreciate art when I see it, in both of these media.

Many IOCCC entries are artistic, in various respects. The context of an obfuscated code competition encourages it. The example I want to display is in a related form: I invented the single screen Perl constrained medium as a blend of artistic and engineering aesthetics. Take a look at the emergency holographic talker; I claim that it is very much a work of art, unlike most of my programs which are pure works of engineering.

Programming is an expressive medium. It is not an art form in itself, any more than prose is per se. Both are media in which many things can take place, including education, instruction, conversation, function, and art. I personally lean very much towards using both of these media in an intensely practical manner, with no concern at all for artistic aesthetics. But I can appreciate art when I see it, in both of these media.

Many IOCCC entries are artistic, in various respects. The context of an obfuscated code competition encourages it. The example I want to display is in a related form: I invented the single screen Perl constrained medium as a blend of artistic and engineering aesthetics. Take a look at the emergency holographic talker; I claim that it is very much a work of art, unlike most of my programs which are pure works of engineering.

An error response that only works correctly in one situation would be as bad as an SMTP server that ignored its input and always produced a fixed sequence of responses: it would work in the one situation it was designed to expect, but cause chaos whenever presented with any other situation.

It's necessary to tell the tty canonical mode code which character one's terminal sends for backspace/erase. This shouldn't be necessary, it's not as if ^H or ^? could mean anything else in that context. I've written about this.

The problem was never a lack of actual capability to perform a rescue. The problem was a lack of awareness of the situation and a lack of willingness to do the unusual. I wrote about this at the time.

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