Big Techday 24: Can Great Programmers Be Taught? - Prof. Dr. John Ousterhout

Can Great Programmers Be Taught? People have been programming computers for more than 80 years, but there is little agreement on how to design software or even what a good design looks like. As a community, we talk a lot about tools and processes, but hardly at all about design. In this talk I will describe my recent work to identify and communicate a set of software design principles, including a new software design course at Stanford that is taught more like an English writing seminar than a traditional programming class, and a book on software design, which is based on the concepts from the class. I will also present a few of the design principles, such as "classes should be deep" and "general-purpose classes are deeper." About the speaker: John Ousterhout is the Bosack Lerner Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. In the past he has founded two companies (Electric Cloud and Scriptics) and been a Professor of Computer Science at U.C. Berkeley. He is author of the book "A Philosophy of Software Design", co-creator of the Raft consensus protocol, and creator of the Tcl scripting language and the Tk toolkit. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has received numerous awards including the ACM Software System Award and the U.C. Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award.