Wednesday
Room 1
16:20 - 17:20
(UTC+02)
Talk (60 min)
The Elements of Programming Style
In 1974, a half-century of technological acceleration and geopolitics ago, Brian Kernighan and P J Plauger published the first edition of The Elements of Programming Style. This short book and its second edition went on to become one of the most influential coding style handbooks of its time and, often without people realising, influenced much advice and terminology (e.g., the term 'clean code') that came after.
In this session, we'll revisit some of the guidelines along with code samples in living languages (C, C++, Rust and Python), to see what has aged well, what has not, what we have learned and, perhaps more significantly, what we have forgotten and failed to learn that still applies in code we write or generate today.
Kevlin Henney
Kevlin is an independent consultant, trainer, speaker and writer. His development interests and work with companies covers programming, practice and people. He is a contributor to the Modern Software Engineering YouTube channel. Kevlin is also co-author of two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series, editor of 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know, co-editor of 97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know and former columnist for a number of magazines and sites.