I remember how we all waited with bated breath for Design Patterns to come out. It was a bit of a disappointment, I recall. Seemed kind of complicated. So now for some of our patterns we need four C++ files per object? Heck with that.

I would disagree that there are tons of Smalltalk examples there. There are in fact a few examples, and they actually don't weigh very much, because they are pretty small, and you don't really need the whole Design Patterns concept if you are a Smalltalk dude. I have a friend who first picked up the book after programming for 17 years in Smalltalk. He put it down after scanning through the first few chapters because it was very self-evident to him.

For young up-and-coming programmers, I recommend setting aside Design Patterns and reading everything you can find written by Peter Norvig. Start with his design patterns essay. The short version of which is that if you need design patterns, (in the sense of the book) then there is something lacking in your language. They are an unnecessarily.

I would never recommend Uncle Bob to anyone looking to improve programmming chops. Read Norvig instead. Uncle Bob came down on the wrong side of TDD and the fellow who failed to TDD his way into a sudoko solution. Peter Norvig comes up with a different notation, not a methodology, not a design pattern, and produced a very elegant solution.

So to improve your programming skills, avoid Uncle Bob, read Norvig, go easy on the methodology.

> dynamic dispatch (thin of doesNotUnderstand, method_missing and __getattr__)

Dynamic Dispatch has a very well-defined meaning. It means dispatching based on the runtime type of a variable rather than the declared, static type. The three methods you mention just happen to exist in languages that feature only dynamic dispatch.

I'm not sure if there's a formal term for the methods you refer to, but they aren't "dynamic dispatch".