I first saw this term on The Daily WTF, in “Inner Platform Effect”. I quote: “They describe a frequently repeated problem in designing a commonly-occurring solution”. Recently I came upon them while going over wikipedia, and found that Anit-Patterns could be actually used as a teaching tool. Some patterns that were an interesting read for me are “Database as an IPC” and “Lava Flow”, mostly because I came close to them. It is interesting to note that programming is about naming things. When you successfully name a concept – it probably means you understand it. Going over this list might give you a frightning feeling of deja-vu. So read and take heed.
Well, this is an old one… Not many people know, but the first mention of the subject was in the article by H. Petard, “A Contribution to the Mathematical Theory of Big Game Hunting”, that appeared in 1938. Since then many more articles were written on the subject. It is always amusing to note that the regular algorithm for searching a sorted array is often-times called “lion in the desert”, only because of this article. I actually wanted to look it up just because I came across this link, and near it were other old jokes, one of them being this old subject. This is usually regarded as the worst kind of humour :)