Robert Martin

President & CEO, Object Mentor Inc

Twenty-Five Zeros
51 minutes, 23.7mb, recorded 2010-06-10
Robert C. Martin

Robert Martin reviews the extensive history and characteristics of programming languages beginning literally with the Big Bang that scientists say started our universe. Martin analyzes how structured programming languages evolves out of the languages preceding them. All of them perform the same fundamental processes: sequence, selection, iteration (SSI).

Martin argues that in spite of the sophisticated trappings of today's cutting-edge software, programmers still depend on archaic, "throwback" tendencies. Structured Programming has become the dogmatic way of organizing SSI. As hardware has morphed and evolved over the past fifty years, the programming community has merely created new formulations and languages to manage sequence, selection, and iteration.

In the future, in much the same way that algebra was shaken by the discovery of calculus by Newton or Liebnitz, Martin hints to his audience that they have an opportunity to transform everything about the way we think about programming.


Robert C. Martin has been a software professional since 1970. He is president and founder of Object Mentor Inc. a firm of consultants who offer XP and agile process consulting, software design consulting, training, and development services to major corporations around the world. Robert Martin is the editor of Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship, (2008, O'Reilly) which aims to help developers produce better, more reusable, code.

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