For our next talk we found one of our favorite NYC developers and technologists, David Nolen aka @swannodette. We saw David speak at this year’s JS Conf and were nodding our heads the entire time. Since then, we’ve been following his recent forays into logic programming, Lisp, and ClojureScript with great admiration. With that in mind, we’re very excited to have him share his latest ideas with us.

Thursday, August 23rd 2012 at 7PM

Paperless Post,
151 W. 25th St., 9th Floor,
New York, NY

Space is limited and RSVP’s are required. Please RSVP here: http://paperless.ly/S4UhlH

Tiny Code

Alan Kay famously described a half page of code in the Lisp 1.5 Programmer’s manual as “Maxwell’s equations of software”. If you’ve ever built a small Lisp interpreter the amount of semantic power is pretty surprising. But the question remains does “small” equate with “toy”? As engineers we’re consistently fighting complexity - much complexity comes from the sheer amount of code that we’re required to manage. Is it inevitable that code loses clarity as it evolves? I’ve spent nearly two years understanding two pages of code - while I have no definitive conclusions perhaps some of the principles and approaches I’ve discovered can be applied to software development.

About David

David Nolen is a musician and curious programmer living in Brooklyn and currently employed at The New York Times. He has been writing JavaScript applications for nearly seven years, past projects include work for Princeton University, platial.com, The Modern Museum of Art, and shiftspace.org. JavaScript brought him to Lisp and he’s been closely involved in the Clojure community for about three years. When he has a free moment he gleefully fixes bugs and improves the ClojureScript compiler in hopes that he can give back something fun to JavaScript.

About Paperless Post Tech Talks

Paperless Post Tech Talks are our chance to bring developers and artists whom we admire into our New York office to talk and share knowledge about their work with our team and the larger New York tech community. They are open to the public but RSVP is required as space is limited. There will be time to talk and mingle with the other attendees and the speakers over craft beer and snacks.