Singleton Considered Stupid

An interview-room grudge turned into a rant, written inside Amazon in September 2004, when Design Patterns was ten years old and, by Steve's count, mostly unread by the people citing it. The opening set piece is a mock interview with a candidate who claims to have studied the whole book and can name exactly one pattern in it (plus a second one that does not exist); Steve formalizes the phenomenon with a pattern name of its own. The digressions carry as much freight as the argument: a college professor who taught AVL trees by writing "AVL Trees are EVIL" on the board and assigning something else, a Bob-and-Fred dialogue about modeling a Loop as a class, some cheerful abuse of Stroustrup's complex-number example, and an announcement that all of this is merely warm-up "for when I start bashing C++ in earnest." He also plants a puzzle he never resolves: pages 243 to 256 of the Gang of Four book cover, he says, the single most important pattern and the one nobody understands, and he declines to say which one it is.

It rambles even by Drunken Blog Rant standards — the back half wanders into C++ marketing history that belongs in a language essay — and the numbered case against Singleton opens by conceding it covers maybe a tenth of the real objections. Read the fine print, though. A closing parenthetical quietly softens the whole title, allowing that the pattern has some good uses and that "basically Evil" was a stance chosen for the occasion. The concession in Steve's author note above was already sitting at the bottom of the original in 2004, where evidently nobody read it.