In my opinion, patterns have failed because they were not formalized enough. You need to understand something exactly before you can successfully approximate it

In my opinion, patterns have failed because they were not formalized enough. You need to understand something exactly before you can successfully approximate it. I personally find type classes (in the sense of e.g. https://wiki.haskell.org/Typeclassopedia https://wiki.haskell.org/Typeclassopedia) to be much better replacement. Related to that, being able to describe things to computer is very useful for compilers etc. Patterns are a language intended to aid computer programming, but usable only for human consumption - inevitably it had to be a failure.