GoF Member Says Time May Be Right for Design Patterns Second Edition

John Vlissides

he question John Vlissides is most asked about the landmark book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software that he and his colleagues wrote more than a decade ago is: when is the second edition due out? Readers clamoring for another edition of a book that has become a perennial bestseller for its publisher is not something Vlissides could have anticipated when the book first took shape.

The 1994 publication of Design Patterns was the culmination of the expertise and contributions of Vlissides, Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, and Ralph Johnson, four computer scientists (better known today as the Gang of Four) who Vlissides says brought together the best of both worlds: academic research and real-world experience:

• Vlissides was a consultant during grad school at Stanford before leaving for IBM Research.
• Gamma built ET++ (a UI toolkit and programming environment) in the late '80s, and his dissertation described the patterns he discovered.
• Helm built programming tools at IBM Research (where he and Vlissides later teamed up).
• Johnson was involved with Smalltalk since graduate school and conducted work on design patterns as a professor at the University of Illinois.