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I got about halfway before completely losing the thread as I had no idea what was being said, unfortunately.

Is "visitor" pattern ever defined in this article?

Is there anything in this article explaining the assertion "Design Patterns Are Temporary, Language Features Are Forever"? I couldn't penetrate the specific example being discussed.

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This is an article about design patterns (in particular the 1994-200x craze for them after the Gang of Four book was published). Having emerged from that era might be table stakes for understanding this article.

Visitor pattern is a code inversion where inheritance and/or function overloading fills in for a missing language feature (concise runtime pattern matching on types). It has its pros and cons but seemed like opening your third eye circa 1995.

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