I sympathise with your point but I think there is a role for patterns of all forms; the advisable and the inadvisable. Essentially they attempt to encapsulate and share experience in a form that can help guide the less experienced. Obviously, a characteristic of an expert is someone who knows when to buck conventions and patterns but what is 'stupid' isn't necessarily always obvious to everyone.

You should flesh that out and make a blog post "Anti-patterns considered harmful".

or just "blogging anti-patterns"

Lambda the ultimate antipattern. The next 700 antipatterns. Why antipatterns matter.

> Is Anti-pattern obsession an anti-pattern?

No. It's precisely because the world is so complicated and the broad generalizations don't work that I think patterns and anti-patterns (ideally with stories behind them that explain the context in which the author discovered them) are so much more useful than, say, the rule format that so much of our industry's content is wrapped in ("stop doing X", "you should be doing Y", and so on).

I've always believed that it's better to be aware of values or behaviors that you should aim for, rather than be given a list of things not to do.

I think these anti-pattern posts are primarily therapeutic for the writer, and I suppose useful to people who oversee or supervise.

The list of anti-patterns is good when you don't want to argue with a colleague, you can just send him the link. There are no hard-set rules in higher level software design, the compiler will not normally warn you of these issue. Having the potential pitfalls nicely documented is useful.

And this list in particular might be useful when you don't want to hurt the feelings of a colleague, when you want to point out their lack of productivity. If you pass them this list, they might discover some similarity to themselves. And the source is a third person (the blogs author), so its an impartial source.

I think if you send someone that list as a suggestion, your likely results range from nothing to simmering resentment.

If you had beef with me, and instead of saying it to my face, you sent me some dumb list, as if it was indisputable proof that you were right, I'd hate hate hate you.

Don't ever do this.

I would just call these archetypes, not anti-patterns. Anti-pattern is a fairly specific domain of poor decision-making.

Real people aren't like this, and these aren't problem solving methods, just kind of unhelpful behaviors. There's nothing wrong with them in certain contexts, and the author doesn't say when or where they work. It's just kind of "look at this list of extremes I want to make fun of."

I had fun reading it. I could relate to some of that stuff. But I just don't see it as the 'doing better' that the author is trying to advocate. Which kind of makes it a greater contribution to confusion and noise than to reliable progress. You could just accuse any thought you don't agree with to be a manifestation one of these archetypes and then you're back at square one, aren't you? Bottom line: you'll always need to think. The fact that the author has to say "we're all a little of all of this" is a big clue that maybe it isn't any more useful than astrology. Hence my comparison.