Thanks for this. Great quote.

FWIW the original, by Rich Hickey, seems to have been "Patterns mean 'I have run out of language'".

Cited here - https://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/lispguide... - but I can't find an original source.

I thought Rob Pike had a good point that, if "design patterns" had been a part of our language 40 or 50 years ago then things like calling convention would have been called "design patterns". Of course we don't talk about calling convention like that these days because languages handle it for us.