Invited Presentation, Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference, 1994.
Reusable software trades one set of burdens for another.
As languages, libraries and frameworks grow in complexity, a designer will find that just properly reusing software requires more knowledge and experience than writing software from scratch did a few years ago. Even so, good designers eventually discover workable usage patterns for any package and can link these patterns together with others they already know. Finally acquired, a system of patterns allows a designer to wield complicated structures effortlessly while focusing full attention on the problems to be solved. And, an international conference has been founded to create a literature of software patterns. This talk will describe patterns in both their mental and written forms and explain how both will fit into the software development process of the future.