Where Design Patterns Originated

Design Patterns are .....

• A General and reusable solutions to common problems in software design.
• Not a finished solution.
• A template or a recipe for solving certain problems.
• Design patterns are not algorithms.

History ....

Design patterns did not originate with software development in fact there are originated with a man named "Christopher Alexander" who was a very successful building architect. He was responsible for more than 200 buildings world wide. In 1977 he introduced a book "A Pattern Language Towns Buildings Construction" and in this book Alexander proposed that there are different patterns in architectural design that one can recognize and one can make reuse of where appropriate.

Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham took the Alexander's idea around classification of patterns and applied it to software development. They introduced their work in OOPSLA conference in 1987.

The first Design Pattern book was the "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" and written by The "Gang of Four": Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides in 1994.