Design Patterns You Should Unlearn in Python-Part1
Search for “design patterns in Python” and you’ll be rewarded with a parade of tutorials showing off how to faithfully re-implement Gang of Four patterns — complete with class diagrams, factory hierarchies, and enough boilerplate to heat a small village. They’ll make you feel like you’re writing “serious” code. Smart. Professional. Enterprise-ready.
But here’s the problem: most of these patterns solve problems Python doesn’t have. They were designed for languages like Java and C++, where you have to jump through hoops just to get basic things done — no first-class functions, no dynamic typing, no modules as namespaces. Of course you’d need a Factory or a Singleton if your language gives you nothing else to work with.
Blindly copying those patterns into Python doesn’t make you clever. It makes your code harder to read, harder to test, and harder to explain to the next poor soul who has to maintain it — possibly you, three months from now.
In this post, we’ll go over a few classic GOF patterns that you should unlearn as a Python developer. For each one, we’ll look at:
