Programming and Minimalism: Lessons from Orwell and The Clash (talk by Jon Dahl, 11/03 @ 2PM)
While my colleague Josh Halliday accurately described the title of this talk as ‘headline porn’, video encoding entrepreneur Jon Dahl’s SEO-baiting talk was actually a pretty well-constructed set of metaphors.
Dahl began by comparing the act of programming to music and art – a person has an interesting and simple idea, people build on it, build on it, build on it… then it becomes old and boring. He played us some classical music showing the cycles of simplicity and complexity from Bach to Beethoven to Mahler and suggested the same was true in other fields, playing The Beatles then Led Zep then The Clash.
Dahl’s suggestion that simplicity and beauty can lead to good code was backed up by his second link, an exploration of Orwell’s famous essay “Politics and the English Language”. He highlighted the name of the US Patriot Act – “is this legislation about how we love the USA?” he asked, pointing out that sloppy writing equals sloppy thinking. The same was true of code, he argued, suggesting that bad writing was more prone to bugs.
By applying Orwell’s economical and stylistic points to the field of programming, Dahl backed up the notion of coding as creativity, although some aspects were open for debate. The notion of ‘beautiful code’ in particular can be slightly problematic – he showed a few slides of overly obscure code which could be simplified, but other developers would argue that ‘clever’ code is beautiful through its form rather than function.
Still, for a boldly-titled talk that risked piggybacking rock ‘n’ roll for a quick win, this turned out to offer some quite original thinking with some decent audience participation. A good start to the festival.
- Matt Andrews
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