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The GoF book uses C++ and was written before the first version of Java existed.

Furthermore, the purpose of design patterns is not to introduce anything new, it’s to provide a catalog of repeatedly occurring existing patterns in software development, including the respective situations each pattern is applicable in, and their individual benefits and drawbacks. An important motivation was to name each pattern, so that when one software engineer says “builder”, the other engineers know what it means. Previously developers encountered certain patterns sooner or later, but didn’t know what to call each pattern, or each developer invented their own names, or meant different things by the same name.

The set of relevant patterns will change over time to some extent as software development changes, but that is orthogonal to the concept of design patterns. It’s a mistake to think of design patterns as specifically the set of 23 GoF patterns. Though some GoF patterns are unlikely to ever become irrelevant, like Adapter, Decorator, Composite, Proxy, Interpreter, Strategy.