What is the Factory pattern and when would you use it?

The Factory pattern is a creational design pattern that provides an interface for creating

objects but allows subclasses or implementations to decide which class to instantiate. It’s

used to encapsulate object creation, promoting loose coupling and flexibility when the exact

types of objects aren’t known until runtime.

Use case: When a class can’t anticipate the class of objects it needs to create, or when you

want to delegate responsibility for object creation to subclasses.