1.4: Insights from Experienced Programmers
Paraphrasing this video's speaker, "Design patterns have been a part of the vocabulary of software design for quite awhile. At the same time, the scope of systems design has moved broadly away from straightforward client-server technology. Systems and services are now expected by end users to be accessible from innumerable points including wearable or embedded devices through mobile phones, tablets, augmented or virtual reality systems, voice assistants, conversational chatbots, and others only barely conceived. As designers of the new range of experiences enabled by this technology, we require new ways to describe, to communicate, and to reason about these increasingly complex systems. This talk describes one such approach: an understanding of the craft of system design that takes its inspiration from functional programming, and from the nature of order as an earlier generation did from pattern languages". The speaker guides us in taking a broad high-level view of programming computers so that their operation is not limited to virtual reality but effective in the world in which we live.
The speaker in this video notes that experienced coders can sometimes tell bad code on sight, not from any aspect of its inherent functionality, but from largely aesthetic characteristics. He also recognizes that writing code is often like writing good literature, if we want it to be understandable and useful. This video is a very interesting step from the philosophical to the practical.