"Everything I Have Learned I Have Learned From Someone Else" by David Nolen (2013)

David Nolen explores how modern programming can be improved by revisiting and learning from classic, underappreciated computer science concepts.

As working engineers we are often not given enough time to explore our craft and if we do the space is often well within our comfort zones. This is unfortunate given that learning is a relatively low risk activity - it's not the same as creating an entirely new idea, a risky endeavor indeed! We have had more than half a century of computer science and at best we continue to draw inspiration from an extremely small portion of it, at worst we blindly adopt known bad ideas. Learning from old great ideas has the benefit that we can see it with fresh eyes. Unintuitively it's our ignorance of the idea that can give an old, good idea renewed power and relevance. We'll take a leisurely stroll through a diverse set of concrete examples drawn from objected oriented user interface programming to constraint logic programming. David Nolen twitter.com/swannodette The New York Times David Nolen spends far too much of his free time having fun hacking on core.logic, core.match, and ClojureScript.