Kevlin Henney
Words and Code and Words about Code
Kevlin is an independent consultant, speaker, writer and trainer. He has contributed to open- and closed-source codebases, 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, editor of 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know and co-editor of 97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know. He lives in Bristol and online.
Past Activities
Code Mesh V
13.45 - 14.25
Concurrent Affairs: Procedural Programming Unlocked
Many programmers assume that procedural programming is a term of insult, or is only relevant when discussing technical debt, or is a paradigm relegated to the past. And when it comes to concurrency, the prevalence of threads running riot through mutable shared state can be at laid the doorstep of procedural thinking. But multithreading was not the procedural paradigm's only response to the question of concurrency.
In addition to a sprinkling of functional hand-me-downs, many trends in modern languages and libraries bear more than a passing resemblance to their procedural forebears. From cobegin to coroutines, from channels to pipelines, many mechanisms of the past have been pulled into the present.
This talk goes back to the sixties and seventies, to a time before the words 'programming' and 'paradigm' had met, to add some history and make sense of current trends.
OBJECTIVES
Look at the history of concurrent procedural programming beyond threads to better understand the trends in modern programming languages and concurrent thinking
AUDIENCE
Anyone interested in programming paradigms, the history of programming languages and concurrent programming