[igouy]

I wouldn't say so:

Two of the authors - Erich Gamma, John Vlissides - clearly had a background in C++.

Ralph Johnson - clearly had a background in Smalltalk.

Richard Helm - not enough information.

They said -- "We chose Smalltalk and C++ for pragmatic reasons: Our day-to-day experience has been in these languages and they are increasingly popular."

They said -- "Our patterns assume Smalltalk/C++-level language features…"

So when the original Design Patterns book was written, which features did C++ have "that didn't come to Java or Python for almost a decade" ?

[thedracle]

Okay... They knew of Smalltalk, and many of the design patterns were around smalltalk features.

And as you pointed out one of the authors had a strong background in smalltalk, and they chose Smalltalk for examples presented in the book.

In other words, they had smalltalk in mind.

It wasn't like smalltalk was some alien language none of the authors had ever heard of, or wasn't the subject of the book in any way.

[igouy]

In their words, they had "Smalltalk and C++" in mind.