Difference between Programming Paradigm, Design Pattern and Application Architecture?

Question

I'm from a non-programming background and have often come across the terms like Programming Paradigm, Design Pattern and Application Architecture. Although I think I have a vague understanding of what these terms mean, I'd appreciate if someone could clarify what each is, how it is different from the other and how these concepts apply to Objective C.

Answer 1

Programming Paradigm: Something like "Functional Programming", "Procedural Programming", and "Object Oriented Programming". The programming paradigm and the languages that use them inform how the code gets written. For example, in Object Oriented programming the code is divided up into classes (sometimes a language feature, sometimes not (e.g. javascript)), and typically supports inheritance and some type of polymorphism. The programmer creates the classes, and then instances of the classes (i.e. the objects) to carry out the operation of the program. In functional languages, the state changes on the computer are very heavily controlled by the language itself. Functions are first class objects, although not all languages where functions are first class objects are functional programming language (this topic is one of good debate). Code written with a functional languages involves lots of nested functions, almost every step of the program is new function invocation. For procedural programming, C programs and bash scripting are good examples, you just say do step 1, do step 2, etc, without creating classes and whatnot.

Design Pattern: A design pattern is a useful abstraction that can be implemented in any language. It is a "pattern" for doing things. Like if you have a bunch of steps you want to implement, you might use the 'composite' and 'command' patterns so make your implementation more generic. Think of a pattern as an established template for solving a common coding task in a generic way.

Application Architecture: Takes into consideration how you build a system to do stuff. So, for a web application, the architecture might involve x number of gateways behind a load balancer, that asynchronously feed queues. Messages are picked up by y processes running on z machines, with 1 primary db and a backup slave. Application architecture involves choosing the platform, languages, frameworks used. This is different than software architecture, which speaks more to how to actually implement the program given the software stack.