Certain events at work have turned me into a bit of a design patterns geek of late, and as such I stumbled across this DDJ article from 1997 (the title of this post is the link). According to del.icio.us not many other people have stumbled across it, but it's a great article. The code listing links seem to 404 even though the listings are at the bottom of page 1 of the article.
Something very important can be learned from this article, which is at best covered tangentially in the GoF book: Design patterns are not language-independent. Calling the C++ and Objective-C ways of writing code "pattern idioms" ignores the point that actually, the code you come up with is more important than the design (customers don't typically want to pay the same cash for your UML diagrams that they do for your executables), and gasp different languages require different code! Different patterns can be used in ObjC and Smalltalk than in C++, and different patterns again in object-oriented Perl. Different patterns will be appropriate for working with Foundation than with the NeXTSTEP (pre 4.0) foundation kit or with ICPak101. Designing your solution independent of the language and framework you're going to use will get you a solution, but will not necessarily produce the easiest solution to maintain, the most efficient solution or one that makes any sense to an expert in the realm of that language and framework.
