Genesis

Civil Engineering influencing Software Design!! You must be kidding!!

Outlandish as this statement may sound at first read, stepping back in time to know and understand how the Pattern movement took shape, the forces that shaped it, and the personalities that gave Design Patterns a significant mindshare of software designers, especially those focused on object-oriented design, will bear out the introductory statement to this article.

The Design Patterns movement started in the year 1990, and gradually grained traction in the next couple of years. The result was the publication of the seminal work on the subject by Eric Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides, popularly known as the Gang of Four. Their catalog of twenty-three design patterns was mainly focused on the design of Object-Oriented Systems, although the Gang of Four made it amply clear that the influences of these patterns went far and beyond the design of object-oriented systems. They also categorically stated their Pattern Catalog wasn’t all inclusive, and that there could be other patterns that could potentially be discovered by those wanting to dig deeper.

Now, for someone just starting out, obvious questions that would crop up in their minds are, “What exactly are Design Patterns? And how did they come to be? What were the influences that had a defining impact on the Gang of Four’s Design Patterns Catalog? This article will attempt to set the context and conclusively answer each of these questions.