Gk Chesterton

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), English journalist, poet, essayist, literary critic, biographer, publisher, apologist, novelist, short story writer, economic philosopher, playwright, artist, detective story icon, and aphorist.

His explanation of Distributism, the economic philosophy he espoused, pre-echoes KentBeck's explanation of ExtremeProgramming:

"The truth is this; and it is extremely, even excruciatingly simple. Either Private Property is good for Man or it is bad for Man. If it is bad, let us all immediately become honest and courageous Communists.... But if it is good for Man it is good for Everyman. But [distributists] are not ashamed of private property; for we would give it to everyone."

Compare this to the Preface of ExtremeProgrammingExplainedEmbraceChange:

• If code reviews are good, we'll review code all the time (pair programming).
• If testing is good, everybody will test all the time (unit testing), even the customers (functional testing).

And so forth.

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See also GkChestertonOnWiki.

Bravo!

But was it really 1994? See WikiHistory for my doubts.

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Of course, Distributism has been largely dismissed by more practical minds as a romantic fantasy....

Of course, one could say the same about XP. In fact, many "practical minds" probably have...

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