Alvaro Videla

Harmful GOTOs, Premature Optimizations and Programming Myths are The Root of All Evil

Writer of Words

Harmful GOTOs, Premature Optimizations and Programming Myths are The Root of All Evil

Over the years our industry has accumulated folklore that shapes what we are as an industry. We repeat maxims like "Premature optimisation is the root of all evil" but perhaps ignoring the context on which that sentence was said. This ignorance has lead us to creating myths that sometimes do more harm than good.

In this talk I will review some of those myths, see their origin and at the same time make a historical review of what was going on in our industry in the '70s, when those myths appeared.

As the old saying goes: _Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it_

Talk objectives:

- Promote a culture of reading more books, academic papers and related material that refers to the history of our field and programming in general.

Talk audience:

- From beginners to experts. No special knowledge is required to attend the talk.

About Alvaro

Alvaro Videla used to work as a Core Developer for RabbitMQ and co-authored the book "RabbitMQ in Action" for Manning Publishing. Before moving to Europe, Alvaro worked in Shanghai building one of Germany's largest dating websites. Some of his open source projects can be found here: http://github.com/videlalvaro. Apart from code related stuff he likes traveling with his wife, listening/playing music and reading books.

Github: videlalvaro

Twitter: @old_sound

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