patterns/intro.md

# Introduction

## Participation

If you are interested in contributing to the Patterns catalogue, check out the [contribution guidelines](./CONTRIBUTING.md).

## Design patterns

When developing programs, we have to solve many problems. A program can be viewed as a solution to a problem. It can also be viewed as a collection of solutions to many different problems. All of these solutions work together to solve a bigger problem.

## Design patterns in Rust

There are many problems that share the same form. Due to the fact that Rust is not object-oriented design patterns vary with respect to other object-oriented programming languages. While the details are different, since they have the same form they can be solved using the same fundamental methods.

[Design patterns](./patterns/index.md) are methods to solve common problems when writing software.

[Anti-patterns](./anti_patterns/index.md) are methods to solve these same common problems.

However, while design patterns give us benefits, anti-patterns create more problems.

[Idioms](./idioms/index.md) are guidelines to follow when coding. They are social norms of the community.
You can break them, but if you do you should have a good reason for it.

TODO: Mention why Rust is a bit special - functional elements, type system, borrow checker