The last slide in the series notes that the talk gets heavily flamed on. It gets flamed on for good reason, IMHO.
From its intro:
> Description
The "design patterns" movement in software claims to have been inspired by the works of architect Christopher Alexander. But an examination of Alexander's books reveals that he was actually talking about something much more interesting.
The presentation has two parts: a takedown of the Iterator (which kinda misses the point of iterator, it’s not purely a way to implement for-loops), and then a description of how Alexander had different goals than the GoF in their book.
Ok... the book isn’t Alexander. Though the patterns community was on the path to trying to achieve similar goals, just this happened to be a handbook of patterns that were more recently discovered. Software architecture is not as well-codified a field as physical architecture, needs a century or two to catch up.
The real complaint is that the book is not a “Pattern Language”, or the same as the famous Chris Alexander book. That’s not in the title of this talk. It’s also not really what the speaker spends much time on. Saying the C++ macro system blows goat dick doesn’t advance arguments about the difference between a handbook of patterns and anything else. Inspired by is absolutely true, inspiration has many effects and forms.
However, GoF is also about discovering and communicating the patterns you discover, and contains useful examples. GHJV spend energy describing how the patterns were identified, clarified and named, and they use this language in presenting the examples.
Meanwhile the author of these slides seems to thing it’s the copy side of a copy-paste command, which it definitely is not. There is no one true Iterator, nor Factory, Visitor, Facade, or any other pattern listed.
So he misses the point by quite a margin, IMHO.