Yes, I bought it and learned it. At that time (1999) I was preparing an interview where questions about this kind of knowledge were expected. I was already an e

Yes, I bought it and learned it. At that time (1999) I was preparing an interview where questions about this kind of knowledge were expected. I was already an experienced developer, the presentation of the DP was new for me and the promises were exciting. But in fact, I had already encountered most of the patterns in projects that were not great examples of good coding (IMHO). Outside this interview (I succeeded), knowing DP has never helped me to be a better developer. The patterns in the GoF are often encountered in libraries written in object oriented languages that do not use much templates or parallelism. There were many in Java library. I think I have not found any of them in the C++ standard library. Now, I see singleton used everywhere because people are too lazy to design correctly program startup. When tasking is involved, incorrect use of singleton causes very nasty bugs (a crash every month). For me, singleton is a dangerous pattern (almost as bad as global variables, sometime worse), the others patterns just happen to be the best way to do some common things. Identifying them is never a problem, having a name for them is useful. The main proof of GoF failure is that we have never seen all the new books with new DPs. I still wait for a new list of common and language agnostic design patterns. Until that, DP remain for me a good example of failure. C has exceeded all its expectations, what is the point of your comparison ?