Singletons are what? Oh, I see...

I found this article by Steve Yegge claiming that the Singleton pattern is stupid and evil.  I know it's old, but I found it via reddit (which I've been getting into a lot more than Digg lately - probably more on that later) and despite having his blog on my feed, I hadn't gone back that far into his archives.

I read about half of the article before I decided I'd write my own post pointing out that he's actually attacking not the singleton pattern itself, but its use in inappropriate circumstances.  I use the pattern occasionally, and I'd like to think I use it when it should be used or at least when it's useful.  The examples he gives throughout represent inappropriate uses for the singleton pattern, not a failure of the concept.

Then I read the rest of it, including the final note which says:

Note: I think there are some good uses for the Singleton pattern, but it's so incredibly overused, and serves as such a convenient crutch for people who don't understand OOP, that I figured I'd just take the stance in this article that it's basically Evil.)

Huh.  So here I am writing a post about nothing.

Damian Brady

I'm an Australian developer, speaker, and author specialising in DevOps, MLOps, developer process, and software architecture. I love Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, and reducing process waste.

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