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Alex Martelli
Senior Staff Engineer, Google

Website | Attendee Directory Profile

Alex Martelli wrote “Python in a Nutshell” and co-edited “Python Cookbook”. He’s a PSF member, and won the 2002 Activators’ Choice Award and the 2006 Frank Willison Award for contributions to the Python community. He works as Senior Staff Engineer for Google. You can read some PDFs and watch some videos of his past presentations.

Sessions

10:45am Wednesday, 07/22/2009

Zen and the Art of Abstraction Maintenance

Programming, Python
Location: Ballroom A3/A6

Alex Martelli (Google)

Average rating:

(3.79, 14 ratings)

Abstraction is a powerful servant, but a dangerous master. We code, design, think, debug ... on a tower of abstractions. Spolsky's Law tells us that "All abstractions leak". This talk explores why they leak, why that's often a problem, what to do about it; I also cover why sometimes abstractions SHOULD "leak", and how best to produce and consume abstraction layers. Read more.

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Alex Martelli Senior Staff Engineer, Google