Home > Anti-pattern

The term comes from the Gang of Four's Design Patterns book, which laid out examples of good programming practise. The authors termed these good methods " design patterns", while "anti-patterns" are the opposite.

Anti-patterns can also be referred to as pitfalls, to emphasise that they are a dangerous trap which an unwary programmer might find themselves in.

Among them are:

• abstraction inversion
• accidental complexity
• action at a distance
• accumulate and fire
• ambiguous viewpoint
• analysis paralysis
• big ball of mud
• blind faith
• boat anchor
• busy spin
• caching failure
• checking type instead of membership
• code momentumCode momentum is the situation where the more places a code dependency is repeated in the code, the more stubborn that dependency is. That is a sort of momentum. The more things are done one way, the more definitely you're headed in that direction, and th
• code smellIn the community of computer programming, code smell is a jargon term used among hackers to refer to a symptom that indicates something may be wrong: a suggestion at the possible presence of an anti-pattern. The article is originally from Perl Design Patt
• continuous obsolescence
• creeping featurismCreeping featurism or creeping featuritis is a phrase used (usually within the sphere of software and information technology) to describe the (often erroneous) idea that more features make a thing or product better than the previous version. The negative
• cut and paste programmingCut and paste programming is an informal computer programming style that simply copies code from one program to another. It is generally criticized as a bad practice or an anti-pattern. The term is in conjecture with a common activity in computing, cut an
• dead end
• design by committeeDesign by Committee is when a group of entities come together to produce a standard, interface, or piece of software. The end result of this is sometimes a product that oversteps its boundaries or does too many things. For a good example of this outcome,
• DLL hell
• double-checked lockingDouble-checked locking is a software design pattern originally known as "double-checked locking optimization". The pattern is usually unsafe on modern computer hardware and/or optimising compilers. It is typically used to reduce locking overhead when impl
• empty subclass failure
• God objectIn object-oriented programming, a God object is an object that knows too much or does too much''. The basic idea behind OO programming is that a big problem is broken down into many smaller problems ( divide and conquer) and solutions are created for each
• input kluge
• interface bloat
• hardcodes are evil
• lava flow
• magic number
• magic pushbutton
• mushroom management
• poltergeists
• premature optimization
• procedural code
• reinventing the wheel
• smoke and mirrors
• software bloat
• spaghetti code
• stovepipe system
• vendor lock-in
• warm bodies