How do we design code? What kinds of things must we balance? Efficiency? Ease of use? Domain sympathy? Simplicity of concepts? Naming? I could go on... what's clear though, is that design of code is an important activity worth considering separately from implementation. Anyone can use a language to get the immediate job done. But to make the code well-designed -- a joy to use, whether it's today or years from now -- that's another matter.
In this talk we'll take inspiration from some of the great thinkers of the past and explore what their ideas might mean in software we write today. How we might better approach the DESIGN of our code. And how we can avoid being trapped by implementation-thinking, which after all is so easy for us...
This is a talk packed full of things which I hope will make you think more deeply about the craft of software. I certainly think about these things all the time, and I continually find that they yield new and surprising insights.
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Ben has been programming in C++ for this whole millennium. He spent just over 20 years in the games industry working for companies like EA and Blizzard; many of the games he worked on used to be fondly remembered but now he’s accepted that they are probably mostly forgotten. After getting more interested in modern C++, in the teens he started giving internal company talks and then talks at various conferences, spreading ideas about types, algorithms and declarative and functional techniques.
In 2018 he left the games industry and worked in finance for a short spell, writing high-frequency trading platforms using the most modern C++ that compilers could support. Now he is a Principal Engineer at Intel where he puts monads inside your CPU.