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Title: The Evolution of Good Code
Proposer: Arjan van Leeuwen
Type: Presentation
Duration: 90 mins
Description:
What do we think of as good code, and how has our perception of good code changed from the early days of programming to the exciting times we live in now? Did the emergence of new programming languages, the rise of functional programming and the need for parallelism change our general opinion? What do we mean when we say code is 'modern', or 'in line with current best practices'? Are we building on a body of knowledge, or just re-inventing the wheel every 10 years?
In this talk we will do a fair bit of digging into the short history of programming, look at the available literature and different coding styles promoted throughout the ages, and have some fun looking at the good, the bad and the ugly historical code that's out there. The session will be interactive, with room for discussion about our personal preferences and the reasoning behind various bits of advice that history has left us with. And after talking a lot about the past, we will also try to see what all those changes mean for our code in the future, and what trends we can see developing right now.