Every once in a while I come across something that mentions one of the Gang of Four patterns and I look it up to refresh my memory and go "what the fuck, why would anyone do this"

Of course the answer is "classes suck", I guess I just subconsciously assume that we have collectively moved past the need for classes, and keep being surprised when we have not

Like look at this crap https://refactoring.guru/design-patterns/visitor

The described "problem" here is just. Why wouldn't you... write a function instead of a method. What

@socks I don't understand where you'd want to use a function instead of a method

thing is, these patterns exist for corporate codebases that have to be worked on by a lot of people and like, comply with regulations, you won't always end up with the most convenient solution

@noiob I get that, and I think a big reason why they end up so messy is because classes are a terrible way of organizing code

"Oh I can't change the class because I might break something about it" Okay, write a function that takes in nodes and outputs XML. Boom, no changes required to the class

@socks where do I put the function? In (corporate, idk if it's actually necessary) Java you need a class to hold your function for you. Also you wanna be able to type-check and, if required, swap out the whole construct, which classes are useful for

@noiob Yeah and this is (one reason) why Java sucks to use!

The type checking is fine, you can have polymorphic functions

@socks can you typecheck for a type of function though?