Patterns

Here's what I'm slowly realizing about how people use patterns (this iteration of this particular insight is due to an article on business patterns I ran across): "The pattern gets you part of the way to the final objective by starting you off from a tried-and-trusted place. It looks familiar, but it is not a solution in itself—it is an abstraction of the solution that you have to embellish to make it the solution that suits your needs."

Here's the insight, yet again: by using the pattern only to document the solution instead of including that description into the code structure itself, we're losing information at both ends.  First, the pattern's structuring of the code is lost once the code is written, and second, changes to the code are not reflected in the pattern, so a learning opportunity for the pattern base is lost.

The pattern is the semantic structure of the solution.  The solution can almost be seen as the syntactic expression of the pattern in this view.

Food for thought.