array_map Is Not A Design Pattern

The Moment It Clicked “Damn it Doug! array_map is not a design pattern!” I will never forget hearing that yelled across the office during a code review. And to this day, every time I run across code that’s trying a little too hard to be clever, that line pops back into my head. How We Get There Doug was a smart engineer. Seriously smart. But he had a habit I’ve seen in a lot of really sharp developers — myself included, if I’m being honest. He’d find a tool, a pattern, or a concept he liked… …and then use it everywhere. At some point, that turned into what we started calling — half joking, half traumatized — The array_map design pattern Which, to be clear, is not a thing. The Problem in Practice I remember reviewing a piece of code from his team where it was literally: an array_map inside an array_map calling another array_map returning an array_map And I’m not exaggerating. It worked and was technically correct. It was also an absolute nightmare to read, debug, and maintain. Clever vs