Two years after this was published, Domain Driven Design was released, which among other things talked about using a ubiquitous language to ensure all members o

Two years after this was published, Domain Driven Design was released, which among other things talked about using a ubiquitous language to ensure all members of a team creating some software were on the same page. So it seems disingenuous to imply the software design community were completely oblivious of these nuances in Alexander's work. More widely, addressing the slightly snidey remarks about C++, which form the basis of most attacks on design patterns - this idea that design patterns are snippets of code certainly did take root, and persists to this day. Even with DDD, people missed many of the more interesting 'soft' factors addressed, and walked away from the book thinking all they needed to do was rename their data access objects 'repository'. But it's utterly useless to say that iterators as a concept are pointless because foreach exists (and whether or not the author wants to believe people are missing the point, this is the foot they launch off from). Languages with first class functions are popular today, and I still hear that you don't need the strategy pattern because of this. And yet I look at Python's urllib (literally today), and its retry mechanism is configured by supplying a value telling it what to do. It's doesn't expose an interface to make the decision yourself. Design patterns in software (whatever the ancestry of the phrase) give you a better granularity to discuss, think about and plan software design. Sure, we have more retrospective patterns, but that's as much to do with the fact that we make a ton more software than architects make buildings. I certainly agree that we haven't, as a community, got full value out of even our own interpretation of design patterns. But I don't think it's because of any of the issues described in this talk, and I certainly don't think it's because of the limitations of our programming languages.