You're absolutely right. But I also think the author's getting at something slightly different - it sort of goes back to that popular barb that design patterns

You're absolutely right. But I also think the author's getting at something slightly different - it sort of goes back to that popular barb that design patterns are just a way to make up for a language's shortcomings. At the time this was written, doing something like foreach in most languages was a horrible PITA. And if you had a language like foreach, and you were watching people use the iterator pattern (which, I realize, is more powerful, but mostly it would get used for stuff that foreach could handle), you'd definitely shake your head sadly to see all the sweating it would take to express simple concepts, and you'd think, "Geez, why are most programming languages so awful?" A lot of languages stayed awful for a long time. Java only recently got better, I think partially in response to pressure from .NET. Nowadays, though, even C++ is a wildly different beast, so the point the article was trying to make has lost a lot of its poignance.