I learned a lot from reading the GOF book two or three years into my programming career. I think like most people, I'd already invented a few of its patterns, like pluggable Strategies, but it was great to have shared names for things.
On the other hand, I interviewed a while back and was talking about a web sockets project where my Javascript received a callback when a message arrived. "Did you think of that in terms of Design Patterns?" they asked. "Not really, callbacks are pretty common in Javascript." They really didn't like that answer. If I could think faster on my feet, I'd have whipped out that quote from Peter Norvig: "Design patterns are bug reports against your programming language."
On the other hand, I interviewed a while back and was talking about a web sockets project where my Javascript received a callback when a message arrived. "Did you think of that in terms of Design Patterns?" they asked. "Not really, callbacks are pretty common in Javascript." They really didn't like that answer. If I could think faster on my feet, I'd have whipped out that quote from Peter Norvig: "Design patterns are bug reports against your programming language."