What are design patterns?

There are different misconceptions surrounding design patterns. In general, they are as follows:

• Missing language features
• Not necessary in dynamic language
• Relevant only to object-oriented languages
• Relevant only to enterprises

But actually, design patterns are just a proven way to solve a common problem. As a concept, they are not limited to a specific programming language (Java), nor to a family of languages (C-family, for example), nor are they limited to programming in general. You may have even heard of design patterns in software architecture, which discuss how different systems can efficiently communicate with each other. There are service-oriented architectural patterns, which you may know as Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and microservice design patterns that evolved from SOA and emerged over the past few years. The future will, for sure, bring us even more design pattern families.

Even in the physical world, outside software development, we're surrounded by design patterns and commonly accepted solutions to a certain problem. Let's look at an example.