Rant about Progamming Patterns

2025-05-17

Ayee AYEEEE 👋🏿

Brother you don't know how many times I've had my chain yanked. "You need a State Pattern System!" "No you need to use strong compositional methods!" "Don't forget that your player NEEDS a Finite State Machine!" "No you need to subscribe to the Strategy Pattern! It's perfect for-"

How about you pattern some bitches??? 🤨

This shit is absurd is it not? I can't believe I fell back into the eternal debate of clean code! I thought I was done with this! For those who are not traumatized like I am, allow me to explain.

So imagine, you are trying to build a car. You know that certain things have to be in place before you can build anything in the first place. You can't lift the car without some kind of jack. You can't loosen or tighten anything without a wrench. To move the engine, you need some type of mini-crane. You know what I mean. There's steps we gotta do before we actually do the dirty work of making the car go vroom.

Well, imagine 20 different engineers, not mechanics, engineers, walked over to you and said, "You know, you won't be able to keep track of all the bolts you take out of the car without some kind of tray. Likely something that you can mark to show which bolt goes in which section of the tray."

Okay. That's logical. It makes sense. And it IS a good idea. But that doesn't help you build the car. It's just to organize your stuff. It's not a big deal though, so you go out and buy a bolt tray.

But then, another group of 20 engineers, once again, they aren't fucking mechanics, engineers waltz over and tell you "Listen, you're using those trays, but as an engineer who makes those trays AND those bolts, I can tell you that the trays will actually erode the coating on the bolts. They'll rust after a couple of weeks. So you actually need to put the bolts into playdoh to organize them."

Once again, there was a weakness that you weren't aware of. They corrode? Holy shit, better go buy some playdoh. Or putty. Or whatever.

But why all this complexity??

If you couldn't tell, I that was about my time trying to Architect a good Player controller. For every fucking solution I got, they all said "well this is good but it doesn't scale well". Scale to WHAT BROTHER? COME ON NOW!

MY PLAYER HAS LIKE 8 DIFFERENT ACTIONS TOTAL. AT WHAT POINT IS ALL THIS SHIT WORTH IT?

"Oh but your player script is gonna be 3000 lines long! It'll be unreadable!"

DO YOU NOT USE COMMENTS? BREAK POINTS? SEGMENTS?

In the modern IDE, even Godot's IDE, we have a PLETHORA of tools at our disposal to help us navigate our code better. More importantly than that, MY BRAIN IS NOT MADE OF SWISS CHEESE! Unlike most of these people I have the uncanny ability to READ MY CODE!

I can't for the life of me begin-

Ok ok. Had to walk away.

The worst part about this patterns stuff is that you just end up doing a little bit of everything in the end anyways y'know? Like, why do all this hoo-ing and holler-ing over if it's Compisition or Hierarchy? You're gonna do both whether you want to or not.

And that took me way too long to realize.

Youtube Tutorials are the Devil. Be careful out there, or these devilish fiends will steal your soul.

Peace | Luther✌🏿