Back in the 1940s, a French writer called Raymond Queneau wrote an interesting book with the title Exercises in Style featuring 99 renditions of the exact same short story, each written in a different style. In my book “Exercises in Programming Style” (available in June 2014) I shamelessly do the same for a simple program. From monolithic to object-oriented to continuations to relational to publish/subscribe to monadic to aspect-oriented to map-reduce, and much more, you will get a tour through the richness of human computational thought by means of implementing one simple program in many different ways. This is more than an academic exercise; large-scale systems design feeds on these ways of thinking. I will talk about the dangers of getting trapped in just one or two prescribed styles during your career, and the need to truly understand this wide variety of concepts when architecting software.

Cristina Videira Lopes is a Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on software engineering for large-scale data and systems. She was a founding member of the Xerox PARC team that developed Aspect-Oriented Programming. She is also a prolific software developer in particular for OpenSimulator, a virtual world server. She is also a founder of Encitra, a company specializing in online virtual reality for early-stage sustainable urban redevelopment projects. She claims to be the only person in the world who is both an ACM Distinguished Scientist and Ohloh Kudos Rank 9.