do design patterns still apply with Python?

[Nick Craig-Wood]

ajones <ajones1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>  I would suggest getting a good grasp on OOP before you get into design
>  patterns. When most people start with any new concept they tend to try
>  and see everything in terms of their new toy, so sticking to one or two
>  new concepts at a time will make things a little easier.

Having read the design patterns book a long time after learning OOP, I
came at it with a different perspective.  I found it was useful for
naming techniques which I'd been using all along.  A good programmer
will find it easy to re-invent nearly all the patterns, but having a
name for them is important.

As programmers we name everything and as a corollary if it hasn't got
a name it is difficult to talk about, so from that angle the book is
good and very applicable to python.  That said I found wading though
pages of language-specific waffle extremely dull!

>  Design patterns are kind of like sarcasm: hard to use well, not always
>  appropriate, and disgustingly bad when applied to problems they are not
>  meant to solve. You will do just fine without them until OOP is at
>  least familiar to you, and by that time you should be a little better
>  able to use them appropriately.

;-)

-- 
Nick Craig-Wood <nick at craig-wood.com> -- http://www.craig-wood.com/nick