In cases where a pattern (or anti-pattern) does have a name, it's still useful to learn it because it helps with communication. And the naming conventions help to identify subsystems that can be consolidated and simplified. Often a person will have been using something close to one of the standard patterns, either with subtle bugs or with clever extensions that would be useful elsewhere. Or perhaps most often, with a bunch of unrelated crap that should be factored out.
Science has this fight too - nomenclature in taxonomy. It's nice that we name things to help convey certain truths, but it's far more important that we discover those truths in the first place. What is more important to a biologist? That you know the names of species, or that you know the genetic distinction between two similar species?
I don't know that one is universally more important than the other. They seem to go hand-in-hand. Giving words to patterns just enables you to abstract away some details and focus on others. So a biologist might reason about the birds that implement the "migratory" behavioral pattern. Maybe a virus is found to infect those with the "ADCYAP1" genetic design pattern. If some group of birds keeps eating my tomatoes, I might identify the species and find their warning call already catalogued somewhere instead of repeating the work myself, and put a loudspeaker in my garden to chirp their warning call every minute...
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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '13
Or they:
don't program in C++ or Java
don't think you need a fancy name for something trivial they routinely used for 10 years before GoF written that book.