Grammar for developers: how language helps you find design smells
We all know how important it is to express our points clearly. It's been said that the most important skill for developers is communication.
George Orwell's "1984" says language shapes the mind. As developers, we get touchy and religious when choosing languages. Most say that DDD's main point is getting the Ubiquitous Language right.
We all crave for "self-documenting code" where names are enough to understand how your program work, by someone on the team, or yourself in a few days.
Notice a trend here? In this talk, I'd like us all to wonder about how we write code, how good grammar and a few tricks can help us find design smells in our code. Who knows, maybe you'll write or revisit your coding style, coin more aphorisms to train your team, or find useful regexps to run against your codebase.
"Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer." -- Edsger Dijkstra
"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things." -- Phil Karlton, quoted by Martin Fowler