Session: Programming and minimalism: Lessons from Orwell & The Clash
Thursday, 11:10 - 12:00
Track: Excellence
Programming is writing. A programmer's job is to express abstract ideas in a specific language - just like the poet, the essayist, and the composer. But while writers and composers spend years improving their style, many programmers think style stops with "two-space indentation". This needs to change. This presentation will discuss style in music, writing, and software. We'll look at such diverse sources as George Orwell, Mozart, and punk music, and will find that much of art revolves around complexity and minimalism - just like software. Finally, we'll look at specific patterns and tools for writing software that is not just effective and efficient, but stylistically beautiful.
Jon Dahl
Jonathan is co-founder of Zencoder, a Y Combinator-backed startup that provides awesome video encoding as a service in the cloud. Before Zencoder, ran a Ruby on Rails development shop, blogged at http://railspikes.com, wrote a Master's thesis on philosophy and theology, and tried (unsuccessfully) to become a Lisp hacker.
![Jon Dahl Jon Dahl](../../Prod/Oredev/2011programnsf/0/76A43012DA9334E1C12578B9005E7936/$file/thumb.jpg)