Hard to take too seriously any OO fundamentalism from someone who cites the Gang of Four patterns as if they were sacred scripture. Actually, they're techniques for working around the limitations of languages like C++, and when evoked explicitly in Ruby tend to be a "code smell".

This comment has been a service provided by the small bot running in my brain programmed to respond to mentions of the GoF book with a link to Norvig's presentation on them:

http://norvig.com/design-patterns/