Thursday, March 29, 2007

Word of the Day: Chernobyl Design Pattern

This gave me a good laugh. The Chernobyl design pattern as explained by Rob Weir (via cruizer) ...

"There is something I call the “Chernobyl Design Pattern”, where you take your worst bug, the ugliest part of your code, the part that is so bad, so radioactive that no one can touch it without getting killed, and you make it private and inaccessible, and put a new interface around it, essentially entomb it in concrete so that no one can get close to it. In other words, if you can't fix it, at least contain the damage."

The good thing in doing this is that it allows you to create a new implementation of the bug-ridden code later at your leisure. But we know that this never happens...

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