Design Patterns are from Hell!

Here we have someone who decided to substitute several weeks of study of statistics with a 48 hour cram session powered by caffene pills and subsequently fail to properly analyze a problem on a test later reflect that he could have solved it properly had he simply taken a more careful and thoughtful approach go on to tell us that Design Patterns are bad because people like him will immediately try to use them in solutions before understanding the problem.

I don't think the design patterns book set the field back. Basically, there will always be people that want to use their memorization skills (learning the design patterns) to do something creative (programming). If there weren't design patterns, something else would have filled that void. (I don't understand why people that aren't good at programming want to program, though. I wish people would realize, "I have no clue" and then change careers. They're making the creative folks look incompetent by association. </offtopic> :)

That article was kind of tedious to wade through. In general, I'm in the camp of "design patterns are language band-aids". PG seems to be one of the quotables on this topic. I was recently trying to elucidate this in my own thinking, given that the languages I've used over the last few years have kept my GoF on the shelf. Here's the best discussion I'd found on the subject: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AreDesignPatternsMissingLanguageFeatu...