Using design patterns really helped me in a large project I did in C# two years ago - although I must admit I used the friendlier Head First Design Patterns as my reference rather than the original Design Patterns book.
I honestly think I would not have been able to do the project without the aid of design patterns. The project's architect was living too high in the clouds to grasp why his architectures were unimplementable, yet tried to micromanage the implementation as well. He continually specified implementation details which violated basic constraints of the language syntax and the static type system (like asking for multiple inheritance in C#). So I would use design patterns to get around a language limitation to do something close to what he wanted. Since he didn't understand design patterns, he found my explanation of how the design pattern accomplished the trick impenetrable enough to just leave it alone.
It backfired on me when he learned the Singleton pattern (which he kept mistakenly referring to as the "Simpleton" pattern), and started insisting that every object should be a "Simpleton".
Anyhow so the reason I didn't downmod you, is that I do think design patterns are useful, but they fix a problem which is partly that the language is broken, and partly a people problem.
Using design patterns really helped me in a large project I did in C# two years ago - although I must admit I used the friendlier Head First Design Patterns as my reference rather than the original Design Patterns book.
I honestly think I would not have been able to do the project without the aid of design patterns. The project's architect was living too high in the clouds to grasp why his architectures were unimplementable, yet tried to micromanage the implementation as well. He continually specified implementation details which violated basic constraints of the language syntax and the static type system (like asking for multiple inheritance in C#). So I would use design patterns to get around a language limitation to do something close to what he wanted. Since he didn't understand design patterns, he found my explanation of how the design pattern accomplished the trick impenetrable enough to just leave it alone.
It backfired on me when he learned the Singleton pattern (which he kept mistakenly referring to as the "Simpleton" pattern), and started insisting that every object should be a "Simpleton".
Anyhow so the reason I didn't downmod you, is that I do think design patterns are useful, but they fix a problem which is partly that the language is broken, and partly a people problem.