Duncan Booth gave a presentation at Python UK 2003 on Patterns in Python.

Anyone not knowing what a software pattern is, and who is the slightest bit interested, should pay a visit to the Portland Pattern Repository.

It was a superb talk, mostly because of the audience participation, and Duncan's handling of that participation.

It was, in some ways, the audience from Hell. Sitting on the back row were Guido and Alex Martelli (AKA the martellibot). Elsewhere sat Anthony Eden and some other Java pattern-head whose name I didn't get. All of these people threw all manner of nasty questions, objections and counter-examples at Duncan, who reminded me of nothing so much as a first class batsman in dealing with them all.

He gave a few good examples: Singleton, Borg, Observer/Observed (or possibly Publish/Subscribe - one of the little debates kicked off over that one). He also presented on the Flyweight pattern. Well, everyone else seemed to understand him...

He also covered what he called 'Little patterns in Python', things like DSU (of which he gave a nice little example, BTW), and the use of list comprehensions. The question here was as to whether these things qualify as patterns. The general consensus was that these are actually idioms rather than patterns. Someone referred to them as 'textures', though, and I rather liked that - these sorts of things do seem to supply the texture to Python source code.