Ted Neward has a nice rebuttal to Alan Williamson’s patterns complaints. I thought the original article was setting up a straw man – yeah, there are patterns snobs, but these same people will probably be snobs no matter what their interest. As I get older I get more fond of the Larry Wall quote:
I do quarrel with logic that says, "Stupid people are associated with X, therefore X is stupid." Stupid people are associated with everything.
If you view enough pages on this site it will eventually appear at the bottom :-)