The thing very few people seem to get about Design Patterns (in the gang-of-four sense): they are not a Good Thing, desirable and worthy of study in and of themselves. They are a necessary evil to compensate for fundamental deficiencies in C-like programming languages.
I remember this whole talk now. I actually have an acknowledgement credit... holy crap. That was a long time ago.
Here's how I see GoF: it was a brand new idea to programmers. GoF was trying to open some eyes to the idea that there were already all these patterns in a lot of software. They called out a few of them. Some are really classic. Some were total misses (how many of you have implemented State?)
GoF was also coming from the Smalltalk world and trying to preach what they'd learned so C programmers could understand it.
So in 2002 when MJ Dominus wrote this, a lot of us were feeling a lot of stress about the rise of Java and C#. A lot of the appeal of these languages was the promise of never having a memory leak. A side benefit was that Java especially didn't enable some of the really risky C++ practices (MI, overloading short circuit operators... basically most of Scott Meyers' "Effective C++" books). But if you were any good at C++, you gave up a lot. Generics were the big pain but I remember at the time really missing the STL <algorithm> library.
MJ was (is?) a Perl / dynamic languages guy. There was vigorous discussion in the "blogosphere" (gag) over the static/dynamic language debate. MJ was basically saying to think bigger than these trivial little patterns. GoF is to software architecture is like nails & drywall are to an architect.
