The pattern is everything around us. It can represent the world’s regularity, a human-made design, a model, plan, diagram, a standard way of modeling, acting and thinking, a distinctive style or form, a combination of qualities and tendencies, etc. That is why the theory, research, and practical works on patterns are so important for different scientific and technological fields, having also stimulated the preparation and writing of the current paper. The paper reviews existing works on patterns, grouping them by different categories, and briefs the developed Spatial Grasp Model and Technology (SGT) and its Spatial Grasp Language (SGL) with the distributed networked implementation, which provide effective distributed solutions in systems management, control, and simulation by active self-spreading patterns. The article shows how practical patterns can be expressed in SGL, including regular patterns, patterns of concrete objects, and different pattern-based management solutions like coordinating transport columns, finding distributed zone coordinates, and spatial tracking of mobile objects. It also gives network examples of distributed pattern recognition and matching with the use of self-propagating active network templates reflecting images to be found. The paper provides a classified summary of the investigated use of SGL for pattern operations in different areas, which includes descriptive patterns, creative patterns, patterns as spatial processes, pattern recognition, self-matching patterns, combined patterns, cooperating and conflicting patterns, psychological patterns, and recursive patterns. The work concludes with the belief that SGL can be used as a real, very effective, and compact language for pattern representation and operations, and SGT should contribute to the pattern theory and resultant technologies.