The Pattern Revelation

I first started working with objects in the Java language. As you might expect, it took a while before some concepts clicked. When it did happen, though, it happened very fast, almost with the force of revelation. The elegance of inheritance and encapsulation bowled me over. I could sense that this was a different way of defining and building systems. I got polymorphism, working with a type and switching implementations at runtime.

All the books on my desk at the time focused on language features and the very many APIs available to the Java programmer. Beyond a brief definition of polymorphism, there was little attempt to examine design strategies.

Language features alone do not engender object-oriented design. Although my projects fulfilled their functional requirements, the kind of design that inheritance, encapsulation, and polymorphism had seemed to offer continued to elude me.