Patterns Document The Obvious

While writing a pattern language on user interfaces, I found that I was censoring myself. I tossed out a few patterns because I felt that they documented the obvious!

One of my patterns suggested to use graphics and well designed layouts to Communicate Visually. How obvious! What a waste of writing! Well, maybe not.

Even some of Alexander's Patterns seem obvious or un-profound. The best provoke the AhaPrinciple?, but some left me going: yeah, yeah, any idiot knows that.

It took me a while to realize that if just one person doesn't feel that the pattern is obvious, then that pattern is an integral part of the language. Without it, gaps in a persons knowledge or experience will cause application of the pattern language to fail. A pattern language must be complete to be useful.

A good pattern writer can make the mundane and obvious readable and tolerable.

A great pattern writer can make the mundane and obvious seem profound.

-- ToddCoram

The "obvious" patterns provide grounding in familiar, well-understood principles that we all need in order to absorb the less obvious. Also, patterns that are obvious to one are often new and exciting to another.

-- TomStambaugh

I don't think it's so much the "obvious" that patterns document as it is the "familiar". If you haven't seen it before, it's not obvious. However, there are some conclusions I can draw that might be obvious, even though I haven't seen them time and time again. The "obvious" part comes into play when I recognize it from something within my own internal repertoire (my personal "bag of tricks" ;-). It doesn't become obviously recognizable until I have used/seen it often enough that I have "internalized" it.

So rather than say "Patterns Document the Obvious", I would prefer to say:

: Patterns document best practices that are "old hat" to seasoned professionals in the particular domain.

--BradAppleton

EditText of this page (last edited August 5, 2004)
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