The design pattern movement (as it applies to programming) was started by the Gang of Four. By Gang of Four, we don't mean the Chinese Cultural Revolution leaders from the seventies or a post-punk group from Leeds, but four authors of a prominent book: Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. This book, written by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johson, and John Vlissides, was published in 1994, and thoroughly shook the programming community.
Back in 1994, when C++ was becoming more and more prominent, object orientation was all the rage, and people were programming in Smalltalk. Programmers were simply not thinking in terms of patterns. Every good programmer, of course, had their own book of recipes that work, but they were not sharing them or trying to describe them in a formal way. The GoF book, as it is mostly called...
