Andy Palmer on Patterns, Idioms and Metaphors

15 August 2012

Andy Palmer used this description of Patterns, Idioms and Metaphors recently to help explain them to a client, which I paraphrase here for posterity: > Patterns carry a medium amount of information to a lot of people and cross language boundaries. > > Idioms carry a small amount of information to a medium amount of people; for example, “this is how we do loops in Ruby”. > > Metaphors carry a huge amount of information to a very small amount of people. A metaphor is something that works at the company level or smaller. It carries a lot of information and gives people within an organisation a common language. > > We find that if we boil a problem down to its essence by producing an appropriate metaphor, then that knowledge tends to spread among a small group faster, while retaining more useful meaning, than via other mediums.