I didn't intend to 'mystify' design patterns, but how useful are they really without experience? Take polymorphism for example. Personally, I didn't have my 'a

I didn't intend to 'mystify' design patterns, but how useful are they really without experience? Take polymorphism for example. Personally, I didn't have my 'ah ha' moment there until I was faced with a problem which really benefited from it (early career and designing a device which had many supported hardware configurations.) It seems obvious now, but it took experience (i.e. making mistakes) to get here. Maybe I'm just a slow learner, but I don't believe being shown a bunch of class Animal {}; class Dog : Animal {} examples really bring the point home. It's a combination of knowing what tools you have available to you and having the experience to know when and how to best use them. In other words, gifting me a high end set of tools will not turn me into a great craftsman overnight. I think the "they're just not trying" argument is going to be hit or miss. Definitely true for some, not true for others. If you're 10+ years into your career and still writing unmaintainable spaghetti... then yeah, you're probably right.