He never said don't learn patterns. He said it's not worth spending all your time trying to memorize them before you even write a line of code.
Memorizing about 20 patterns for 3 months before you really write any code is way worse than just hacking together something and improving it because after enough time you know what's wrong.
The "you just know" thing is really powerful. I'm not a professional artist but I just know that if you had a yellow background and you drew something in the foreground with the same yellow code it wouldn't work because you couldn't see it.
When writing shitty code I just know it's bad because I find myself having to copy/paste something 8 times or maybe it's close enough to a copy/paste that it still feels wrong so then I fix it.
Memorizing about 20 patterns for 3 months before you really write any code is way worse than just hacking together something and improving it because after enough time you know what's wrong.
The "you just know" thing is really powerful. I'm not a professional artist but I just know that if you had a yellow background and you drew something in the foreground with the same yellow code it wouldn't work because you couldn't see it.
When writing shitty code I just know it's bad because I find myself having to copy/paste something 8 times or maybe it's close enough to a copy/paste that it still feels wrong so then I fix it.