Actually, MJD was more interested in showing how people often mis-interpret Alexander, and that Perl naturally does a lot of the stuff you have to struggle with in other languages. He picks on C++ because the Design Patterns book describes some "patterns" (remember, they aren't) for C++ for things we do in Perl without even thinking about them.

Patterns aren't something that you bolt onto a program. It's not about the coding but about the design, which doesn't depend on the language :)