Agreed. I never really saw design patterns as a reference manual for how to solve problems (as I think some people do/did). Instead, I saw it as a shared voca

Agreed. I never really saw design patterns as a reference manual for how to solve problems (as I think some people do/did). Instead, I saw it as a shared vocabulary. For example, if I say that X is a factory for Y or an iterator over Z, you know exactly what I mean.