alt Hacker NewsThe other thing that design patterns allow, is to learn pitfalls, applications and other attributes about them.
To keep in your analogy, if you have a 3KG naildriver with a 2m handle you'll quickly find out that driving nails into a drywall with that leaves you with no wall. And that it's a bad idea to use a "Naildriver" to drive these "spiralled-slothead-nails" (aka screws) into wood.
But with a common language, such as design patterns, you can easily learn where they are good, what their limits are, in what cases other patterns fit better, and what pitfalls to avoid and so on.
If I search the web for "why is it so hard for my naildriver to drive in spiralled-slothead-nails" I'll get zero results. But when I search for "why is it hard to hammer in a screw" I'll get good results. May sound like a silly example, but for me that sillyness illustrates how obvious designpatters should be.
I totally agree with that!
And it doesn't mean at all that everybody should learn the whole encyclopedia of tools by heart. But having it formalised somewhere is useful: as soon as someone tells me "what you're trying to do sounds like this design pattern", I can start searching and reading about it.
Of course if that someone tells me "you suck, you should know that there is a design pattern for that because you should read about design patterns every night before you go to sleep", it will be different :-).