Grady Booch

Grady is a designer, a methodologist and a pattern enthusiast. He is a chief scientist at RationalCompany and a series editor for Benjamin/Cummings, and one of the ThreeAmigos...

Grady is best known for the UnifiedModellingLanguage, the BoochMethod which he presents in his book, ObjectOrientedAnalysisAndDesign. He advises to AddMoreClasses to simplify complex code.

He is also the author of ObjectSolutions.

I had Grady Booch as an instructor at the Air Force Academy back in the late 70s and early 80s, before he became so well known. Yes, he was an officer in the Air Force! Excellent teacher, along with Richard Bolz. They had both been involved in the development of Ada, I believe. They gave us an excellent grounding in software development, with a mixture of the best texts, papers, and other current research, as well as lots of pragmatic advice and plenty of projects. I don't think I ever took a final exam in any Comp Sci class there; the grade was based primarily on programming projects throughout the semester.

Even though the "standard" paradigm at the time was the structured techniques, Booch et. al. introduced some object oriented concepts to us, which at the time were very new and theoretical. When OO reared its polymorphic head in the software industry, I felt like I had had an advance preview back at the Academy; it wasn't totally new. When Booch's star ascended with UML and Rational, I felt gratified to have known him and learned from him earlier. I've also felt like most of the underlying principles of good software design that they taught us in the context of the structured techniques (information hiding, coupling/cohesion, interfaces) have remained very useful in the OO world. -- AndyMoore

I've looked at clouds from both sides now -- PhlIp to GB on the XpMailingList

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