It seems odd to talk about hash tables as design patterns. To me they are just a data type. It is true that other languages have a built-in implementations and

It seems odd to talk about hash tables as design patterns. To me they are just a data type. It is true that other languages have a built-in implementations and yet others have a standard user level implementation while in C there are many. But I see design patterns as a framework level thing. What you wrote about them being different in different languages is true, however. When the book came out we had a thread in the mailing list for the Self programming language looking at the 23 patterns and nearly all of them took no special effort to use in Self. An object could be a Singleton, for example, by simply not having "traits clonable" as a parent like most objects did.