What is an Anti-Pattern? Can you name a few? (God Object, Spaghetti Code, Golden Hammer)
Anti-Patterns
An anti-pattern is a commonly recurring solution or practice that appears useful initially but tends to create significant problems when applied inappropriately. Anti-patterns are not simply 'bad code'; they are recognizable patterns of poor design or implementation that repeatedly lead to maintainability, reliability or scalability problems.
- 1
God Object: one class knows or does far too much.
- 2
Spaghetti Code: tangled control flow and dependencies make behavior difficult to understand.
- 3
Golden Hammer: using one familiar technology or pattern for every problem.
- 4
Big Ball of Mud: architecture becomes highly coupled and difficult to reason about.
- 5
Premature Optimization: optimizing before identifying a meaningful performance bottleneck.
- 6
The correct response is to identify the underlying design problem rather than mechanically applying another pattern.
Follow-up Questions
- How do you refactor a God Object?
- How does high coupling create a Big Ball of Mud?
- What is the difference between an anti-pattern and technical debt?
- Can a design pattern become an anti-pattern?