On Tue, 3 Dec 2002, Andrew J Bromage wrote:
On Mon, Dec 02, 2002 at 10:27:21AM +0100, John Hughes wrote:
There are patterns of that sort in our programs, which we would probably rather call design techniques, which aren't so easily captured by a higher-order function definition.
As a matter of interest, _why_ would we rather call them "design techniques" than "design patterns"? Is it just an aversion to buzzwords, or are they fundamentally different?
No particular reason, maybe, except that the buzzword isn't established in our community. And no wonder, since we have no catalogue of Haskell "design patterns" -- we're not even completely sure what they are! If there were such a catalogue, and it became popular among Haskell users, and it called the entries design patterns, then that would establish the term. One difference which I see between a "technique" and a "pattern" is that there is a uniform and somewhat formal way of describing patterns: thought has been put into what you should document when you describe a pattern. Maybe we should stick to vaguer terms such as "technique" until we've put in the corresponding thought! John