John Vlissides has passed away. He was a member of the “Gang of Four” behind Design Patterns, one of the landmark texts in software engineering. I keep a copy of it near at hand, and I’ve not seen many programmer’s offices which didn’t have a copy in a prominent, easy-to-reach place. By helping introduce the concept of design patterns to the software engineering community, he helped programmers communicate with each other at a higher level of abstraction without sacrificing fidelity.
He will be missed.