Beautiful code: code with better type

Wednesday 2nd August 2017, 6:30 pm.

Speaker: Peter Hilton

Venue: Room 4.31, University of Edinburgh Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB.

This event is free of charge and open to all, but please book via Eventbrite

Refreshments and networking from 6:00 pm.

This meeting is supported by NCR.

Synopsis

The way we visually present code today would do little to surprise the first owner of the 1955 IBM typewriter that introduced the Courier typeface. Innovations since then include little more than bigger monitors, syntax colouring and better monospace typefaces. Meanwhile, layout and typography, already centuries old during the desktop publishing revolution thirty years ago, inform the visual presentation of most kinds of text.

The goal of this talk is to reconsider what code looks like. This talk uses step-by-step examples to show how layout and typography can make code beautiful, and considers how this would change the programming experience. After all, as Knuth pointed out, ‘Programs are meant to be read by humans, and only incidentally for computers to execute’.

About the speaker

Peter Hilton is a software developer, writer, speaker, trainer, and musician. Peter’s professional interests are business process management, web application development, functional design, agile software development and documentation. Peter currently works as a programmer and technical writer for Signavio, working remotely from Rotterdam, and delivers the occasional lecture and training course. Peter’s software development interests include web applications, service architecture, software development methodology and practices, and web-based collaboration. Peter has presented at several European developer conferences, including ACCU, Scala eXchange, Devoxx, Øredev, Jfokus, Javazone, geecon and TopConf. Peter co-authored ‘Play for Scala’ (Manning Publications) and has taught ‘Fast Track to Play with Scala’.