John Vlissides


John Matthew Vlissides was a software engineer known mainly as one of the four authors of the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Vlissides referred to himself as "#4 of the Gang of Four and wouldn't have it any other way".

Education/Career

Vlissides studied electrical engineering at University of Virginia and Stanford University. Since 1986 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 modeling.

Death

John Vlissides died on Thanksgiving 2005 following a struggle with complications from a brain tumor. He was 44 years old.

Posthumous

and Grady Booch have called for stories to remember him by. Since then, there has been a steady inflow of contributions located at the WikiWikiWeb page for.
In recognition of the contributions to computer science that John Vlissides made during his lifetime, ACM SIGPLAN has established the . The award is presented annually to a doctoral student participating in the OOPSLA Doctoral Symposium showing significant promise in applied software research.