{"id":305,"date":"2009-09-03T20:34:08","date_gmt":"2009-09-03T19:34:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/?p=305"},"modified":"2009-09-03T20:34:08","modified_gmt":"2009-09-03T19:34:08","slug":"icfp-the-best-bits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/archives\/2009\/09\/03\/icfp-the-best-bits\/","title":{"rendered":"ICFP &#8211; the best bits"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So, for me, the best bit of ICFP was a common theme which underpinned a few of the talks.  It was the idea that you can use programming as a way to learn stuff, rather than just a way to produce programs to run.  In other words, the primary outcome of your programming session is an &#8220;aha&#8221; moment in your head, and if you get a runnable program too then that&#8217;s a secondary benefit but not the main objective.<\/p>\n<p>So I&#8217;m not talking about learning how to program better.  I&#8217;m talking about using a programming language as a way of writing down ideas.  The act of writing them down often clarifies your mind.  But then, as you write down more stuff you might notice commonality &#8211; and programming languages often let you capture that commonality and express it quite cleanly.  And, perhaps, the resulting version will be something you didn&#8217;t ever anticipate &#8211; perhaps letting you see that two seemingly unrelated areas were in fact just two facets of one common underlying idea.<\/p>\n<p>This theme came out clearly during the talks by Dan Piponi (sigfpe) and Conal Elliott; I didn&#8217;t manage to follow everything they covered, but to me they were both examples of this kind of approach.  Very sweet, and much more interesting than &#8216;programming for programmings sake&#8217;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So, for me, the best bit of ICFP was a common theme which underpinned a few of the talks. It was the idea that you can use programming as a way to learn stuff, rather than just a way to produce programs to run. In other words, the primary outcome of your programming session is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":306,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305\/revisions\/306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}