A brief history of design patterns

Software design patterns had their origin in the late 1980's when Ward Cunningham and Kent Beck developed a set of patterns for developing elegant user interfaces in Smalltalk [5]. At around the same time, Jim Coplien was developing a catalog of language-specific C++ patterns called idioms [9]. Meanwhile, Erich Gamma recognized the value of explicitly recording recurring design structures while working on his doctoral dissertation on object-oriented software development [16]. These people and others met and intensified their discussions on patterns at a series of OOPSLA workshops starting in 1991 organized by Bruce Anderson [ 4, 3] and by 1993 the first version of a catalog of patterns was in draft form (summarized in [17]) which eventually formed the basis for the first book on design patterns [18]. All of these activities were influenced by the works of Christopher Alexander, a building architect and urban planner [2, 1] who coined the term ``pattern'' to refer to recurring designs in (building) architecture. In the summer of 1993, a small group of pattern enthusiasts formed the ``Hillside Generative Patterns Group'' and subsequently organized the first conference on patterns called the ``Pattern Languages of Programming'' (PLoP) in 1994 [11].