Could you explain what is meant by design patterns in programming?

Design patterns are proven solutions to common problems that frequently occur in software development. They describe how to organize code and interactions between objects to improve flexibility, reusability, and maintainability.

For example, the "Singleton" pattern guarantees that a class has only one instance and provides a global point of access to it. In C++, this can be implemented as:

class Singleton {
public:
    static Singleton& getInstance() {
        static Singleton instance;
        return instance;
    }
    Singleton(const Singleton&) = delete;
    void operator=(const Singleton&) = delete;
private:
    Singleton() {}
};

Patterns help developers communicate in a common language and create higher-quality architectures.