Sam Aaron, Innovation Factory

Sam is interested in the aesthetics of programming languages, domain specific languages and the more general concept of language oriented programming. He received his Ph.D. in Computing Science from Newcastle University, for which he designed a domain specific language to represent interests within virtual environments. In his spare time Sam contributes to the programming language Ioke, a folding language focussed on expressiveness and abstraction. Sam has also worked as a technical reviewer and essayist for Rails books, written Ruby news articles for InfoQ, co-founded the Newcastle and Amsterdam Ruby user groups and regularly speaks at conferences such as JAOO, QCon, RailsConf and local events.

Innovation Factory designs ways to harness the power of people. To collaborate creatively, making the companies they work for more open and innovative. http://www.innovationfactory.nl/

Presentation: "Aesthetic programming with Ruby"

Track: Railing

Time: Monday 13:20 - 14:10

Location: Musikhuset Nr. 222

Abstract: If you stick your ear out for long enough around the Ruby community, you'll hear the phrases "beautiful code" and "domain specific language" used in abundance. Why is this, and are they notions that are really useful for us in our everyday coding lives? This presentation will examine the concepts of beauty and programming languages, within the broader context of aesthetics, using Ruby and a few domain specific languages as our guide. The examples used will be extracted from academic research, project work in industry and personal project work. The importance of considering aesthetics in our code will be discussed, while we come to some interesting conclusions about perspective, audiences and you.