A growing number of folks are interested in elementary patterns, patterns at
a level appropriate for students just learning to design and write programs.
These patterns can serve a role in how we help novices learn to program, and they also can serve as the foundation for the more advanced patterns that we document in the software world

This community first took concrete form at the "Elementary Patterns and their
Role in Instruction" Hot Topic workshop at ChiliPLoP'98. (See the final report
of the workshop at
http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/patterns/elementary/chiliplop98/summary.html)
There we focused on pattern languages for use in the first year of academic
computer science instruction. Others have broader interests in elementary patterns, and I'm not even sure if, and to what extent, our demarcation of
boundaries is meaningful.  As a result, I have created a web page at
http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/patterns/elementary/
to appeal to a very broad definition of elementary patterns and of teaching
and learning. The community may well evolve toward a better understanding
over time.

-- EugeneWallingford

I think these are great stuff. They are a careful re-examination of things I thought I understood 20 years ago. Reading them, I gained a new appreciation for recursion and looping. These patterns are much in line with my vision of patterns- making the easily screwed up easy. --KentBeck

----
Some time back, I was explaining the idea of patterns to someone and was lead 
by his background to a particular quasi-example. CobolLanguage programmers the world 
over have written tens of thousands (or more!) of match-merge programs. The 
classic case is a "master file" and a "transaction file" with records being 
added to and updated in the master.

Around this same time, an associate of mine was inheriting a system that had 
previously been developed and maintained by contractors directly engaged by 
the users. A CeePlusPlus program had been in development and was "ready" to go into 
production. It was lovely C++ with everything you want in C++ and more! There 
were classes, there were templates, there were lovely comments and there was a 
very consistent coding style. 

And it didn't work! Incorrect results when you got them, infinite loops more 
often. My associate spent two days debugging it with the contractors. Seems they 
didn't know how to write a match-merge.
--KielHodges

Guess I should add that those CeePlusPlus guys shouldn't have been reinventing the wheel. But, in addition, there are people every day reinventing minor variations of wheels. I know I did when I was writing such stuff ten years ago.