Where do design patterns come from?

The idea of design patterns -- best practices to solve similar problems in different contexts -- was originally developed by architects. Adopted and reimagined in software engineering in the late 1980s, design patterns gained popularity when they were collected and codified in Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, a 1994 book by Gamma, Helm, Johnson and Vlissides. The four authors have since been commonly referred to as the Gang Of Four (GoF).

Design patterns have gained significant traction in Java and C# communities, but they can be used in all object oriented languages.