DevNexus 2019 – Mixed Paradigms – Method to the Madness Keynote- Venkat Subramaniam

See the table of contents for my other blog posts from the conference

@venkat_s

We are problem solvers

Programming languages

  • For communication
  • Expressive and fluent code
  • Uses about 15 languages. Not fluent in any of theM
  • Quadrants – static vs dynamic. Strong and weak typing. Ruby gives a lot of warnings because strongly typed.

“All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection” -David Wheeler

  • procedural – pointers/references
  • object oriented – polymorphism
  • functional – lambdas

Imperative vs declarative

  • more important than OO vs functional.
  • Functional programming is declarative programming with higher order functions
  • imperative is easy to write but harder to read
  • functional is easy to read. Harder to write partly because we spent so many years writing in imperative style
  • Imperative gets harder as problem gets more complex
  • need to focus on both imperative and functional. Hybrid languages
  • lazy execution does not survive mutability. Dont work around compiler errors!

Future – will care more about async than running in parallel. Want to be able to make async without changing structure of code. Kotlin and JavaScript do this now. Java will in a few years with fibers

Changing mind is important. Not whimsickly. But to make progress

Wisdom is realizing there are no absolutes

My take

Great start to the day. I like how so many languages were compared. With humor too. I like how Venkat does a mix of slides and live coding/notes. I really like that he acknowleges that it is ok for things to feel hard

Devnexus 2019 live blog index

This post is the index for all my live blog posts at Devnexus. I forgot my external iPad keyboard at home. It’s been years since I tried to live blog on the built in keyboard. Will see how this goes!

Wednesday

  • I gave a full day workshop for the firat time! I am so proud that i was able to keep people engaged for seven hours! (See my slides on Speakerdeck)

Thursday

Friday