Brandon Savage has a new post today talking about the value of design patterns with his response to another post. He tries to put the emphasis back on making good OOP code instead of worrying too much about the actual design pattern.

Anthony [Ferrara] makes some great points in his article, and I highly encourage you to read it. But I want to address the perspective that he puts forward, which is that worrying about design patterns is less important than worrying about writing great object oriented code.

He relates design patterns to the sentence structures you learn when learning a new (spoken) language. He suggests that, while they're a good way for developers to communicate, they shouldn't be the only emphasis. When a developer becomes more fluent in a language, the patterns should become less important but are still a good structure for good development practices.