For a professional programer, if Beck is deemed "unsuccessful", I don't know who among us you will call successful.
If you are a professional programer in 2016, you very likely are familiar with the term "refactoring". This term was placed in our vernacular by the book "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code" by Martin Fowler [1]. In the Preface to the book, Folwer writes:
Once upon a time, a consultant made a visit to a development project.
The consultant looked at some of the code that had been written; there
was a class hierarchy ..
...
I must admit to some bias here. I was that consultant. Six months later
the project failed, in large part because the code was too complex to
debug or to tune to acceptable performance.
The consultant Kent Beck was brought in to restart the project, an exercise
that involved rewriting almost the whole system from scratch. He did several
things differently, but one of the most important was to insist on continuous
cleaning up of the code using refactoring. The success of this project, and
role refactoring played in this success, is what inspired me to write this book,
so that I could pass on the knowledge that Kent and others have learned in using
refactoring to improve the quality of software.
...
In this book I describe the fruit of a lot of research done by others. The last
chapters are guest chapters by some of these people.
....
I've left the final word, Chapter 15, to the master of the art, Kent Beck.
You might also have heard of xUnit style of testing. Beck had a hand in many of these frameworks.
TL;DR - pay heed to the history of your profession.
This sort of demonstrates my point perfectly -- if you look at the most successful people in the world, what percentage would you classify as a "programmer"? And of those, how many are actively programming?
TL;DR - If you want to be in the top tier of success, don't take advice from programmers.
Among my most successful people, about 80%. Counting only those who are actively programming it drops to around 50%.
It's easy to forget that the definition of success is relative. Someone you consider a success might be considered a miserable failure in life by others.
Actually, come to think of it, 2/3'ds of the successful people I know are actually formally trained accountants who have people skills. Although I think accounting and programming have a similar mindset. If those same people were 20-30 years younger, they might be programmers today.
If you are a professional programer in 2016, you very likely are familiar with the term "refactoring". This term was placed in our vernacular by the book "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code" by Martin Fowler [1]. In the Preface to the book, Folwer writes:
You might also have heard of xUnit style of testing. Beck had a hand in many of these frameworks.TL;DR - pay heed to the history of your profession.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Improving-Design-Existing...