[Baypiggies] ACCU on Wednesday 'Abstraction as Leverage' Alex Martelli

[Walter Vannini]

When:      Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Topic:     Abstraction as Leverage
Speaker:   Alex Martelli
Time:      6:30pm doors open
        7:00pm meeting begins
Where:     Symantec
        VCAFE building
        350 Ellis Street (near E. Middlefield Road)
        Mountain View, CA 94043
Map:       <http://tinyurl.com/334rv5>
Directions: VCAFE is accessible from the semicircular courtyard
between Symantec buildings <http://tinyurl.com/2dccgc>
Cost:      Free
More Info: <http://www.accu-usa.org>

We code (and design, think, debug, ...) on a tower of abstractions -- we can't do otherwise! And yet... abstraction is a powerful servant, but a dangerous master. Per Spolsky's Law, "All abstractions leak". Indeed, they often SHOULD "leak": the most productive level for our work is NOT always the most-abstract one. The talk explores how best to produce and consume abstraction layers, focusing on programming, where such issues are burningly important, technical, and real, on a day-to-day basis.

Alex Martelli is Senior Staff Engineer at Google. Alex holds a laurea in Ingegneria Elettronica from Bologna University. He wrote Python in a Nutshell, and also co-edited the Python Cookbook. He's a member of the Python Software Foundation, and won the 2002 Activators' Choice Award and the 2006 Frank Willison Memorial Award.

Alex spent 8 years with IBM Research (earning three Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards), 12 years as senior consultant (Win32, Fortran, C, C++, Java, etc) at Think3 inc, and 3 years as a Python freelance consultant (mostly for AB Strakt). He has taught Programming, Numerical Computing, and Object Oriented Design at Ferrara University and other venues.

Meetings are open to the public and are free of charge.

---- Upcoming ACCU talks -----

Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Kevlin Henney
"Giving Code a Good Name"

Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Speaker TBA
Topic TBA

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The ACCU meets monthly. Meetings are always open to the public and are
free of charge. To suggest topics and speakers please email Walter
Vannini via walterv at gbbservices.com