Talk:Kent Beck

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[edit] Patterns

"introduced design patterns"

Did he? I hate to short change Kent, but I would give credit to Gang of four ?

Regards, Ben Aveling 02:34, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Don't confuse popularizationwith introduction

No, the contribution of the Gang of four was to popularize the notion of patterns in software development, outside of the already established patterns community which had been developing for at least the eight years prior to its publication.

I'm pretty sure that the credit does in fact to to Kent (and Ward Cunningham), who as far as I know were the first to introduce patterns to software development, based on the work of Christopher Alexander in architecture and community design. They first presented this during OOPSLA in 1987 and their paper is even referenced in the bibliography of this article. The patterns community had already emerged years prior to the publication of Gamma, Helm, Ralph Johnson, and Vlissides, "Design Patterns". in 1995.

Kent started writing a column on "Smalltalk Patterns" in "The Smalltalk Report" in 1993, a fact which is acknowledged on page 357 of "Design Patterns." These later formed the basis of his "Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns" book

--Rick 15:33, 13 November 2005 (UTC)