RalphJohnson arrived late at BruceAnderson's first
ArchitectureHandbookWorkshop at OOPSLA'91.
He had spent the morning giving a
tutorial on frameworks, so he wasn't sure what was
happening.  The group had spent the morning writing
a table of contents for the Architecture Handbook,
and conflicting visions of the future were in the air.

KentBeck's vision of the future was patterns.  When
Bruce told the group to work in pairs to write a entry
for the Architecture Handbook, Kent grabbed Ralph and
said "I've always wanted to write a set of patterns for
using HotDraw.  Let's do it!"  Ralph agreed.  Kent was
happy to have such a compliant team.  They spent
an hour or so writing down 8 or 9 patterns for using
HotDraw, and then coerced NormKerth into acting as their
test subject.  They taught him the patterns, and then 
when it came time to present their entry to the group,
they had Norm show it off by designing a dataflow diagram 
editor, in real-time and unrehearsed.  Both Ralph and
Kent thought it was a fabulous success.

A month later, Ralph looked at the patterns and thought
they looked bare and feeble.  Nobody would understand them
unless they were better explained.  He couldn't understand
why he had been so excited a month before, but trusting the
memory of his enthusiasm, he fleshed out the few lines into
a few pages, and started circulating them, first to his
students and then to the HotDraw mailing list.  He tried to
get Kent's attention (though probably not hard enough), but
Kent seemed to be busy with other things.  As he got feedback
and added examples, the paper grew longer.  Eventually
he submitted it to OOPSLA, and the result was
DocumentingFrameworksWithPatterns.
A year or so after that he learned that Kent would have
liked to have been a coauthor, and he felt bad that he
had been so rude.  This didn't permanently damage their
friendship, as can be seen by PatternsGenerateArchitectures.
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CategoryPatternHistory
CategoryPatternStories