Most of these patterns come from Smalltalk (which was probably the original language of complex enterprise OO systems). I think that what made Java this kind of

Most of these patterns come from Smalltalk (which was probably the original language of complex enterprise OO systems). I think that what made Java this kind of entrprise language is that it was reasonably similar to smalltalk so all these patterns and concepts can be reused and on the other hand it is similar to "normal" programming languages so average programmer does not have problems with it's workflow and IDE (as is the case with ST). On the other hand most uses of design patterns in Java code (eg. 90% of uses of Observer pattern, especially in cases when it is called Listener) seem to be to be compensating for fact that Java is not Smalltalk(/JavaScript/Ruby/Python/C# whatever with first class classes and methods). JavaScript is language that is very different from anything else. Depending on how you look at it it has either unconventional semantics (majority view) or unconventional syntax (my view). It's object model is strong and often useful (you can emulate class-based inheritance with it, not the other way around), but I agree that it is to some extent afterthought (although I have strong feeling that our reasons are very different). What is probably largest problem of whole JS is the "Java" part of it's name and weird syntax deliberately designed to "look-like-Java" or "look-normal", which simply does not match underlying semantics. Coming from C/Unix background I actually consider the IDE thing burden in itself. I expect that there are some easily editable source that is transformed by series of some steps into final program, but all changes happen only in the original input. Which is simply not case in Java/ST world, where you essentially need pretty complex IDE (on the side note: few years ago some Java IDE I was using for quick experiment forbade me from saving source file with syntax error with it... WTF?).