John Vlissides
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Matthew Vlissides (August 2, 1961 - 24 November 2005) was a software scientist known mainly as one of the four authors (referred to as the Gang of Four) of the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Vlissides humbly called himself "#4 of the Gang of Four and wouldn't have it any other way."
Vlissides studied electrical engineering at University of Virginia and Stanford University. Since 1976 he worked as software engineer, consultant, research assistant and scholar at Stanford University. From 1991 he stayed at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York as research staff member. He was author of several books, of many magazine articles and conference papers and was awarded with several patents. His work concentrated on object oriented technology, design patterns and software modelling.
Vlissides died on Thanksgiving morning, 2005 at 1:30 a.m. after a long struggle with complications caused by a brain tumor.
Ward Cunningham and Grady Booch (on his blog entry of Nov 27, relaying a call from John Vlissides's widow, Dru Ann) have called for stories to remember him by. Since then, there has been a steady inflow of contributions located at the WikiWikiWeb page for Vlissides, including ones from many of Vlissides's friends and associates, such as Martin Fowler and Richard Helm.
