Category: Video

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Programming Video

Worth watching: Videos on programming paradigms and object-oriented vs. functional programming

Watching programmers debate can sometimes be like watching a monkey knife fight.

Even in this day and age, when programming languages freely mix object-oriented and functional features, there are still arguments over which approach is “better”, or at least which one should be used in a given situation. Here are some videos that cover these paradigms; they might event give you some insight on how you can use them in your day-to-day coding.

4 Programming Paradigms In 40 Minutes – Aja Hammerly

Here’s a nice overview of four programming paradigms: object-oriented, functional, procedural, and logical, including the strengths of each. Start with this one.

Why Isn’t Functional Programming the Norm? – Richard Feldman

Functional programming is actually the earliest programming paradigm, but it’s not the primary paradigm of any of the top ten programming languages that programmers are using in 2019.

Object-Oriented Programming is Embarrassing: 4 Short Examples — Brian Will

In this video, Brian Will — an OO skeptic — takes four examples of “proper” object-oriented code and rewrites them using a procedural approach, resulting in what he considers to be “better” code. He’s not a big fan of the philosophy where data and code grouped together — he says “Let data just be data; let actions just be actions.” I leave it to the viewer to make their own call as to whether he’s right or wrong. (Hey, I figured I should throw in at least one curmudgeon into the list!)

FP vs. OO: Choose Two — Brian Goetz

When it comes to FP vs. OO, I’m of the “Why not both?” school of thought, and so in Brian Goetz.

Categories
Programming Video What I’m Up To

Now that I’m getting paid to be a developer again…

…it’s time to revive this video that New Relic put out way back in 2011 to promote their application monitoring service.

Titled We Love Developers, it features some of the brightest lights in the industry:

  • Matz: Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of the Ruby programming language
  • Guido van Rossum: Creator of the Python programming language
  • Linus Torvalds: Creator of the Linux operating system and the Git version control system
  • DHH: David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Ruby on Rails framework
  • Bill Joy: Co-founder of Sun Microsystems and creator of the vi text editor
  • James Gosling: Lead designer of the Java programming language
  • Sir Tim: Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web
  • Marc Andreesen: Co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, co-founder of Netscape, co-founder of Andreesen Horowitz
  • Woz: Steve Wozniak, creator of Apple
  • Rasmus Lerdorf: Creator of the PHP programming language
  • The Gu: Scott Guthrie, creator of ASP.NET, Executive VP of Microsoft’s Cloud and AI group
  • Sergey Brin: Co-founder of Google
  • Dries Buytaert: Creator of Drupal

At the end of the video, they wanted to use the image of a more “everyman” developer to represent you, their customer. Guessed who they picked:

My photographer friend Adam P. W. Smith (my old business partner; together, we were datapanik software systems and we worked on some pretty interesting projects back in the late ‘90s) took the picture back in August when I was visiting him in Vancouver. I’d arrived a day early for the HackVAN hackathon and was sitting in his kitchen getting some work done when he decided to get a couple of shots. He poured me a glass of scotch, set it on my accordion, which I’d set down on the chair beside me, and staring taking pictures.


In case you were wondering, you can find out more about my new gig in the article titled — appropriately enough — The new gig.