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When a field becomes known as a "get rich quick" career, and there's a massive influx people into the field... it's a little sadly-funny to realize that more people in the field know the names of people who got the most rich, than know the names of people who helped get the field itself to that point (through craft/avocation/research/etc.).
> Alan Kay has every right to be bitter. He's a great software architect, and came up with OOP as a perfectly reasonable policy for managing complexity. Now most people associate OOP with commercial garbage and that VisitorSingletonFactory nonsense.
> If you came up with a set of really good ideas that were later bastardized and mutated into the sort of business horseshit that's destroying software, wouldn't you be pissed off?
When I had the option of learning CS and knowing I'd be learning Java (ie VisitorSingletonFactory) I wish I'd known that it was a short lived fad and nothing near what Kay intended.
Invented XP, and the wrote the most well known book on TDD.
"Extreme programming (XP) is a software development methodology intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements. As a type of agile software development, it advocates frequent releases in short development cycles, intended to improve productivity and introduce checkpoints at which new customer requirements can be adopted."
I'd say he's pretty sad about how agile turned out. Its pretty different to what XP advocated for in a lot of organisations.
Kent Beck's claim to fame are JUnit, Extreme Programming and his contributions to capital-A Agile. JUnit is still extremely popular but hasn't been associated with him for a while. Capital-A Agile and Extreme Programming, like JUnit/SUnit, were highly influential at the time but relative to the scale of the industry can be considered niche at this point. Everyone who has spent any time in the industry has most likely heard of "agile" but nowadays that can mean anything from full-fledged SCRUM to "we use Trello". Likewise "we do TDD" often simply means "we try to maintain some level of test coverage".
Again, I'm not discounting the impact of his contributions. He popularized a lot of ideas that have had a lasting impact or even survived to this day. However we as a culture have a tendency to glorify the achievements of individuals rather than seeing them as parts of a wider context: Extreme Programming for example is largely a collection of practices that already existed at the time and explicitly builds on them.
If you're a Smalltalk programmer in the 1990s or any kind of software professional in the early 2000s, you must have been very culturally isolated not to have heard of Kent Beck directly or indirectly. But complaining in the mid-2020s that someone might consider him a "nobody" because they genuinely have never heard of him ridiculous is kind of like complaining about youngsters not knowing who famous Hollywood A-list celebrities Anne Bancroft, Rex Harrison or Natalie Wood are. Fame is momentary and fleeting.
EDIT: At the risk of making you feel old (it certainly makes me feel old): the mid-2000s were 20 years ago, the mid-1990s were 30 years ago. There are software developers who have been doing their job for a decade and were born after the Gang of Four book was first published.