The Design Patterns Conspiracy: How It All Happened

As told to Jonna, Ericha, Rickie, and Rhonda, four acquisitions editors at the technical publishing company Minuson-Welsey. Told by the fifth Gang member himself, Steve Swillvelis.

“What would you do if I told you that the Gang of Four and their design patterns, and everything that has come since then, is a crock and a conspiracy?”

Well, I don’t need to tell you that he had us at “crock”.

“Erich and I were roommates in college, and that’s where we met the other guys. Grady and Kent were TAs there, Christopher Alexander was on the faculty, and the seven of us hung out a lot. We were geeks even then, but we were savvy geeks, and Grady and Kent told us about what they’d been researching in between helping undergrads with their calculus.”

‘We’ve got dating figured out.’ Just like that, Grady told us. One night during a really long compilation. We all looked at him and told him he was full of shit. Kent laughed.

‘He’s full of something, but it ain’t shit. Have you noticed that Grady and I never hang out with you guys on weekends? It’s because we’ve got social lives and women love us. Do you have any idea how unusual that is, for guys who read Knuth for fun?’

We had thought it was odd. You couldn’t go for more than a half hour in their room without Chelsea or Veronica or Beth calling. We just figured that Chelsea et al were using them for help in their lambda calculus classes.

‘It’s not just us,’ said Christopher. ‘It’s a fundamentally emblematic system of template-oriented repeatable behavior, inside a structured context.’ (Even back then he talked like that.)

So John asked, were they doing something special, or was it just that he told all the girls he was well encapsulated? and we all laughed.

Kent was serious, though. He said, ‘We have created a set of repeatable, reproducible, stable, effective dating behavior patterns. They work for us flawlessly. We’ve been working on this since our senior undergrad year. Now we’re ready to standardize it and see if other guys can make it work too. Do you want to try it out?’

We were all nodding way before he finished the sentence. Systematic, scientific dating? Holy mother of Macintosh.

So he gave us the book, just typed up in Wordstar and photocopied, nothing special, and told us to go home with it. And to report back in a month with our findings. 

I could say the rest is history, if it hadn’t been suppressed. We went through the book, which was a perfectly systematic, geek-readable, system of behavior patterns that would get you a date or, well, better, if you just implemented it. The copies still had Grady and Chris’s handwritten notes, like ‘try this wearing a sweater’ or ‘coffee shop on Grand is great for this one.;”

“What were the patterns? You’re killing us,” interjected Jonna. 

“That’s what I’m telling you. They were all the regular patterns that everyone knows, the Facade and Iterator and even MVC in a primitive form, but it was for dating. And incredibly effective. Not to brag, but a month later I barely had time to report back to Grady and Kent and even less time for class. I was also running out of money, too. I had more women than I knew what to do with. That’s when I met my wife, too.”

“Grady and Kent and you-all, the gang of four--”

“The gang of FIVE. It was the five of us who really set the wheels in motion. I cut out on my own the next semester, transferred to another schedule, and John and Erich and everyone did all their other stuff on their own.”

“OK, the gang of five,” Jonna agreed. “This was all originally about dating? And it really worked? Then....well, that doesn’t mean that any geek with $19.99 for the book should be dating up a storm, with women coming out his ears? And other places?”

“Yep,” said Steve. “In theory, anyway. But here’s the kicker. Imagine a world where all these geek guys have social lives. And families. And work 8-5, and no weekends, and never bother spending their free time on open source projects, and generally treating programming like a job and being way more interested in other things.”
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