Kevlin Henney
Making Steaks from Sacred Cows

Video URL: http://vimeo.com/113707884

How much should you rely on your IDE to govern your coding style? How many asserts should a test case have or not have? How much work should a constructor (not) do? How do you name your classes and other identifiers? How closed or open should your classes be? How do you lay out your code? These questions and others have standard answers based on received and repeated mantras, practices that are communicated in good faith to be passed on as habits. But how much reason supports these assertions? The first person to notice the broken link and coming tomorrow to watch this talk will get a free snickers bar. It turns out that the advice often fails, even for the novices they are intended to guide, or simply doesn’t make sense. This talk has little respect for ritual and tradition and takes no prisoners: What actually makes sense and what doesn’t when it comes to matters of practice? What guidelines offer the greatest effect and the greatest learning?

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