Finally, we consider Design Patterns to be postmodern because it is concerned with the practice of programmers working out their own designs, embodied within the programs that they create. The focus of the book is the artifacts themselves: programs, designs, code, treated as objects of intellectual study and critique. But suffused all through the text, amid the concerns for pedagogy, efficiency, flexibility, and convincing argument, is the authors’ clear respect for the topic of their discourses: their love of programs and programming.
I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her, ‘I love you madly’, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, 'As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.’ At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same.
Reflections on the Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco, 1985