1. The authors claim that “Design patterns help a novice perform more like an
expert”. How?

The patterns capture best practices of expert software engineers, but are
packaged such that they can be understood and employed by novice programmers.


2. What's the relationship between design patterns and programming languages?

Design patterns are at a level of abstraction above languages.  They describe
patterns of software objects, but not necessarily the language in which those
objects are written.


3. In a few sentences, describe the “Abstract Factory” pattern. What problem
does it solve?

The abstract factory hides concrete object creation from the code that uses the
objects it creates.  In the example in the paper, it's being used to allow
interface-agnostic code to be written that can, at runtime, decide between
interface elements.