I think you would have loved our study group. Especially the early years.

My personal position on the value of the art of namings, eg Facade, Proxy, Wrapper, Adapter, was somehow capturing the author's original intent. As distinct from the implementation. How it's meant to be used.

Lofty sentiment coming from someone condemned to decades of code maintenance.

Professionally, methinks design patterns, and their misuse, has been mostly detrimental. Maybe because the notions were taken too literally, treated prescriptively rather than descriptively.

Calling everything a Decorator. When it's actually a Chain of Command. And when you try to patiently explain the evils of silent failures, buried deep in the levels of indirection, to the "senior architect" author, that same architect insults your intelligence and walks off.

The mere utterance of Factory and Singleton in public somehow empowering legions of noobs littering entire organizations (and libraries) with innumerable implementations.

Trying to debug something called a "Write thru Cache" when its anything but.

Etc.