"Famous person" feels like a very pre-21st century concept at this point. Like it or not, celebrity status is fractal in the age of influencers. There are people you and I have never heard of and will likely never hear about making an impact on millions right now.
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.
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.