The Design Patterns Conspiracy: How It All Happened
(continued -- see beginning)

We thought about it. Our eyes widened. We checked unconsciously to make sure our Palms and laptops still worked. It was a horrifying thought.

Cut geek output in half, or down to one third, and what do you get? Nothing. No open source software, very few of the advancements of the past three decades, and definitely nobody ever hitting within three years of a release date. No MacOS. Ericha started whimpering and we all got a little tense.

“I hate to say it,” I told Steve, breaking the silence, “but it’s one of those Search for Spock things. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. It would be disastrous if geeks were out on dates all the time. Releasing that book to the tech world would shake the very foundation of our economy and society.”

“Exactly,” said Steve, “and that’s exactly what Erich and John realized one morning after their Saturday night dates had left and their Sunday brunch companions hadn’t arrived. As they realized that not only were they going to flunk out that semester but they really didn’t care. And that they’d thought more than once about a career in marketing.”

“So they had a meeting, and decided that the knowledge was too dangerous. They, the four, had to severely curtail their activities, get back to work, and under no circumstances release the information to the hundreds of male undergrads who had been clamoring to get a look at these mysterious design patterns they’d heard about.”

“So over the next month, they put together a distractor project, just applied the same principles to software with a little fundamental OO thrown in, and they published their Design Patterns for software. Now keep in mind, this was just a distractor project. They wanted the dogs off their scent. They had no idea that the patterns would become so big. But they took it all in stride, and realized that, OK, the patterns were legitimate for software too.”

"Here's a little-known fact: MVC, which has taken off bigtime in software patterns, was a last-minute filler since John insisted that they needed one more pattern for people to believe this was real. They were running on fumes and Red Bull when they came up with that one."

We were silent for about a minute. Software patterns, just a ruse to distract us from the real truth. If Agent Mulder were a programmer (and if he were real), he’d be wetting himself with excitement.

“So...OK, Steve, but why are you telling us all this, and why now?” asked Rhonda. “Aren’t you violating their trust? What if this gets out?”

Steve laughed. “Well, I was never in on the original agreement. I think it could have been managed, keeping a few of the most dangeorous ones back, or releasing them only in Holland. That kind of thing. But mostly, have you seen the tech industry lately? Nobody doin’ anything, nobody has jobs. They have plenty of time to date. And for the good of the future of humanity we have to get these geeks mating with nongeeks. The world can only stand so many ultrageek babies before we’re human robots.”

We looked at each other. This could be big. This could be very big.

“We’ll do it,” we said in unison.

So that’s the situation. Software design patterns—a simple serendipity. The real work, dating design patterns, had been suppressed for twenty years, had allowed the tech boom of the 90s, and had led to 99% male companies where a guy could go for weeks without seeing a woman.

It sure explained a lot.

So we got the original manuscript from Steve, with all the original notations etc. on ideas and notes that the Gang and Christopher had put in. We've had it thrown into Framemaker and prettied up a bit, and now we’re just putting it out there for the world to see--the real Facade, the real Decorator, the little-known Half Bad Boy Plus Protocol.

Oh, and lest you resent the gang of four, Erich et al, remember this. They were young. They were idealistic. They were doing what they thought was right. The truth had to be suppressed.

But now is the time to set it free.