You are now in FULL VIEW
CLOSE FULL VIEW

Who Ever Said Programs Were Supposed to be Pretty?
Recorded at:

by Brian Foote on Mar 15, 2012 | NOTICE: The next QCon is in New York Jun 10-14, Join us!

Summary
Brian Foote wonders in this session if the quest for clean or beautiful code makes sense in a bottom-line obsessed business world.

Bio

Brian Foote holds the position of Senior Scientist at the Refactory, Inc. and has a long affiliation with the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is well known in the object, patterns, and Smalltalk communities.

Software is changing the world; QCon aims to empower software development by facilitating the spread of knowledge and innovation in the enterprise software development community; to achieve this, QCon is organized as a practitioner-driven conference designed for people influencing innovation in their teams: team leads, architects, project managers, engineering directors.

Related Editorial

Hello stranger!

You need to Register an InfoQ account or to post comments. But there's so much more behind being registered.

Get the most out of the InfoQ experience.

Tell us what you think

Allowed html: a,b,br,blockquote,i,li,pre,u,ul,p

Email me replies to any of my messages in this thread
Community comments

Fun talk by peter lin

As someone who enjoys the trenches and deciphering other people's code, a lot of the examples ring true.

Re: Fun talk by Simon Turner

It's simply a myth that dirty=fast. Programmers that produce ugly code also tend to be amongst the least bright, the least experienced, the least motivated or a combination of all three. This means that they tend to be far less productive then the "quick-and-dirty" ethos would suggest. This is exacerbated when the program is of any significant size, because then programmers are required to collaborate, and ugly, unreadable code misses the opportunity to be internally expressive of its intent and organisation. It gets yet worse when programs have a significant lifespan, since ugly code eventually deteriorates to such an extent that it becomes impossible to extend or adapt expeditiously. I've seen one business fail completely as a direct result of all this, and another brought to its knees. Not pretty.

Excellent talk - "ball of mud is your choice!" by Sai Matam

Excellent talk. The talk started out being funny. But it was not funny anymore as I realized that the funny things that Brian mentioned were true! It is a lifestyle choice! Do you want the 'big ball of mud' ?

Sai Matam
www.codewalk.com

Allowed html: a,b,br,blockquote,i,li,pre,u,ul,p

Email me replies to any of my messages in this thread

Allowed html: a,b,br,blockquote,i,li,pre,u,ul,p

Email me replies to any of my messages in this thread

3 comments
General Feedback
Bugs
Advertising
Editorial
 InfoQ.com and all content copyright © 2006-2013 C4Media Inc. InfoQ.com hosted at Contegix, the best ISP we've ever worked with.
Privacy policy