2021 ACSW – Keynote Address- James Noble

Prof James Noble

Victoria University of Wellington

Abstract

Programming is usually imagined as a solo activity: an intense hacker hiding in their bedroom or cubicle, hunched over a hot VDU with green text on a black background, error messages flashing red. Online lectures, pair programming, remote debugging, agile methods, open source, live-streaming, and live-coding, in various different ways, take programmers out of their cubicles and onto a stage. In this talk, I’ll reflect on these different contexts for programming, hopefully finding some commonalities as well as highlighting some differences. I’ll describe some of my own experiences hunched over a keyboard, improvising zoomed lectures, algoraving sorting algorithms, and live-patching hardware synthesizers. I’ll try to answer the questions: What does it mean when computer programming moves from being an Art to being an Act?

Biography

James Noble is Professor of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Victoria University New Zealand. He is the author of Small Memory Systems: Patterns for Systems with Limited Memory (with Charles Weir), the editor of Prototype-Based Programming and Pattern Languages of Program Design 5 (with various co-editors). He has published many papers on object-orientation design patterns, aspects, software visualisation and software engineering in international academic conferences and journals.