Design patterns are heavily used in the OO world, and there are many lengthy books written about them. I'd like to examine why this is and what these patterns stem from exactly.
As the name implies, design patterns are templates for structuring code to solve common problems. This is a fine idea in and of itself, but the following question needs to be asked. If programming is ultimately about automation, and patterns are repetitive tasks by their very nature, then why are we forced to write them out by hand each time?
The reason for this appears to be due to lack of abstraction in the language. Many design patterns are simply specific cases of an underlying abstraction which unifies them. Having a language which can express such abstractions means that you don't have to learn many different patterns for specific situations.
Bruce Lee once said "I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks once. But I fear the man who has practiced one kick ten thousand times". I think this applies here as well: it's better to learn a general solution for many problems, than to have a specific solution for each small problem you run into.
So, next time you're looking at a language, don't simply look at the one that has the bigger list of features, instead look for one with a few features that work well together.