Silicon Valley Code Camp : October 6th and 7th, 2012

Douglas Crockford

Virgule-Solidus
About Douglas
Douglas Crockford discovered the JSON Data Interchange Format. He is also the author of _JavaScript: The Good Parts_. He has been called a guru, but he is actually more of a mahatma.
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Speaking Sessions

  • Programming Style and Your Brain

    9:45 AM Saturday   Room: SmithWick
    Computer programs are the most complicated things that humans make. They must be perfect, which is hard for us because we are not perfect. Programming is thought to be a "head" activity, but there is a lot of "gut" involved. Indeed, it may be the gut that gives us the insight necessary for solving hard problems. But gut messes us up when it come to matters of style. The systems in our brains that make us vulnerable to advertising and propaganda also influence our programming styles. This talk looks systematically at the development of a programming style that specifically improves the reliability of programs. The examples are given in JavaScript, a language with an uncommonly large number of bad parts, but the principles are applicable to all languages.

  • Monads and Gonads

    11:15 AM Saturday   Room: SmithWick
    The wonders of monads are finally revealed without resorting to Category Theory or Haskell. It turns out that monads are trivially expressed in JavaScript, and are one of the key enablers of Ajax. Monads are amazing. They are simple things, almost trivially implemented, with enormous power to manage complexity. But understanding them is surprisingly difficult, and most people, once they have that ah-ha moment, seem to lose the ability to explain them to others.