alt Hacker NewsIt's both.
The *concept* of patterns makes sense. A shared language that developers can use when building things.
The *reality* of patterns has been much less useful. The original ones were indeed a reaction to warts in the popular languages of their era. And as we tend to do in our industry, these have been cargo culted along the way and for some reason I still see people talking about them as first class citizens 30 years later.
People don't seem to realize that patterns should be and are fluid, and as our industry evolves these patterns are evolving as well. A major difference between software engineering and the analogous fields people use when talking about patterns is those industries are much older and move less quickly
A pattern is exactly what the word "pattern" implies; something that lots of people seem to have found useful, so you might find it useful too.
If you are a language designer and you see lots of people writing the same boilerplate, it behooves you to put it into the language. A pattern is a desire path - pave it. In that sense, they are missing language features.