r | p 2012: The Scams That Derail Programming, Motherfucker - Zed Shaw, Creator of Mongrel

This talk is part of the 18th annual reflections | projections conference (http://acm.uiuc.edu/conference) run by the Association for Computing Machinery, University of illinois at Urbana-Champaign student chapter (http://acm.uiuc.edu).

Biography:
Zed A. Shaw is the creator of the greatest software development methodology ever: Programming, Motherfucker. He also writes books that teach people to code, including Learn Python The Hard Way, Learn Ruby The Hard Way, and soon to be released, Learn C The Hard Way. He plays a lot of guitar, and builds them too.

• Category

  Science & Technology

[Adam Reineke]

Starts at 9:00.

[r3bol]

Zed is like my programming guru. 

[azngoku666]

"and the Raelian motivations of uhh.." classic!

[CrazyHorseInvincible]

33:17 Zed is demonstrably wrong, at least for APIs. Microsoft does usability studies in a controlled environment for their frameworks to determine how long it takes to discover functionality and exploit it. The guidelines they publish they can explain on the basis of past uses/abuses by actual programmers. They do the same for their languages, though I don't know to what extent. Just removing underscores from LINQ queries in VB.Net is 1 example.

[CrazyHorseInvincible]

I'm about halfway through it, and I'm realizing that everything Zed just said applies to his earlier talk called "The Web Will Die When OOP Dies." He ranted about how shitty HTML + Javascript is and how a "Usable Programming Paradigm" will save us. He was just a few steps shy of slamming us with exactly the kind of bullshit he's denouncing here.