Comparison
Design patternvsGang of Four
Design pattern
someone described a solution in four words and everyone in the room pictured roughly the same code.
A named, reusable arrangement of objects for a recurring design problem, along with the trade-offs of using it. The value was never the code — most patterns are a dozen lines — it is the name, which turns a five-minute explanation into a two-word one. The failure mode is treating the catalogue as a shopping list rather than a vocabulary, which is how a codebase ends up with an abstract factory producing one product.
Full entry →Gang of Four
somebody says a pattern is 'GoF' and means it came from the 1994 book rather than from a framework.
The four authors of Design Patterns (1994) and, by extension, the twenty-three patterns catalogued in it, split into creational, structural and behavioural. Several of them are now language features rather than patterns — iterator, and in functional-first languages strategy and command — and a few are almost never written deliberately. It is still the shared reference point that lets an interviewer say 'a structural pattern' and be understood.
Full entry →