For any intermediate developer (2 or more years) audience
Ever wanted to walk up to a new programming language that you have never seen before, and realize, "Oh, I get it" without having to study it for ten years first? It means you'll know where and how this new thing would apply, and could guide your teams and colleagues into or around the new thing, depending on your needs! And it's doable, if you've seen a different language that has those same concepts front-and-center. But now you're back to the "learn a new language top to bottom" problem again, and what about those "new features" that the new language introduces? How can you have seen them already if they've never been there?
It turns out that almost no language feature is actually new; many of them have been around for years--decades, even. Like Latin long before us, there's a small number of programming languages that represent the primordial "starting point" for many of these concepts that so many languages use as their template. Learn those primitive, original, earliest languages--the "ur-languages"--and you'll have the world of programming languages pretty much covered.
In this presentation, we're going to take a look at those "Ur-Languages"--the languages that embody the key, core principles that underlie and power literally every other programming language on the planet. You won't come out of this session with a new tool ready to use for production code on Monday; instead you'll come out of this session with a deeper understanding of not just your current language, but all programming languages, and perhaps more importantly, a whole raft of ideas that you can incorporate into your current and future designs.
Published on 30 May 2024