Kevlin Henney
Kevlin is an independent consultant, speaker, writer and trainer. His development interests are in patterns, programming, practice and process. He has been a columnist for a number of magazines and sites and has been on far too many committees (it has been said that "a committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled"). He is co-author of A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing and On Patterns and Pattern Languages, two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series. He is also editor of 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know. He lives in Bristol and online.
The Forgotten Art of Structured Programming
Structured programming. That's so 1970s, right? It was all about gotos (or not) and has no more relevance to current programming practice, with its exceptions, threads, object models, functional hand-me-downs and refactorings, than flared trousers, disco or punk. Or perhaps there is and always has been more to structured programming than this oversimplified view?
This session looks back at the thinking that motivated and informed structured programming, from "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" to block-structured code and its realisation in object orientation, from formal reasoning to design by contract, to look forward at its enduring implication for modern programmers, namely being able to understand and reason about the code they are looking at.
