Design Pattern and Python: Any book recommendation? Your view?

[Chris Rebert]

On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 5:33 PM, Anthony Kong <anthony.hw.kong at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sorry to resurrect this topic. By google search the last discussion was in 2003.
>
> I would like to find out what is the current prevailing view or consensus (if any) on the use of Design Pattern in python?

I can only speak for myself, but the whole idea of design patterns is
broken. The existence of nontrivial design patterns indicates language
deficiencies. For more extensive corroborating discussions, see:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/06/are-design-patterns-how-languages-evolve.html
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AreDesignPatternsMissingLanguageFeatures

Python thankfully has relatively few/minor deficiencies (so long as
one judges it within its dynamic language niche), so design patterns
per se aren't too relevant to it.

The canonical Python-specific design pattern is Borg
(http://code.activestate.com/recipes/66531-singleton-we-dont-need-no-stinkin-singleton-the-bo/
) [a variation on Singleton], and nowadays it (like its parent,
Singleton) is considered to be of dubious utility/advisability.

> I am doing some 'fact-finding' in this area on request of my colleagues. Some of them want to buy a book or two in this subject area. Hopefully the newsgroup can give me some book recommendation and insight in this topic.

The closest alternative would be some publication that gave examples
of using some of Python's fancier, higher-level features, such as
metaclasses and context managers. I haven't been in the market for
such a book, so I have no good recommendations to give. Closest I
could suggest would be the Language Reference
(http://docs.python.org/reference/ ) and relevant PEPs
(http://www.python.org/dev/peps/ ; they tend to include examples by
way of motivating use-cases).

> I myself pretty much subscribe to the view that the nature of python language actually do away much of the need of the use of DP, but it is just a personal view. It comes form my experience of migrating from webware4py (webframework based on J2EE/servlet idea) to cherrypy

I am glad you agree.

Cheers,
Chris
--
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