Back in the 1940s, the French writer Raymond Queneau wrote a book titled Exercises in Style featuring 99 renditions of the exact same short story, each in a different style. This talk, based on a book with the same name, shamelessly does the same for a simple program. From monolithic to object-oriented to continuations to relational to publish/subscribe to monadic to aspect-oriented, and much more. You will get a tour through the richness of human computational thought by through the lens of one, simple, program in many different guises.

More than an academic exercise; this about freedom of expression. I’ll argue that you are in dangers of getting trapped into a single prescribed style during your professional career, and the understanding all is needed to truly understand how to architect large-scale systems.

Crista Lopes is a Professor of Informatics in the School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on software engineering for large-scale data and systems. Early in her career, she was a founding member of the team at Xerox PARC that developed Aspect-Oriented Programming. Along with her research program, she is also a prolific software developer. Her open source contributions include being one of the core developers of OpenSimulator, a virtual world server. She is also a founder and consultant of Encitra, a company specializing in online virtual reality for early-stage sustainable urban redevelopment projects. She has a PhD from Northeastern University, and MS and BS degrees from Instituto Superior Tecnico in Portugal. She is the recipient of several National Science Foundation grants, including a prestigious CAREER Award. She claims to be the only person in the world who is both an ACM Distinguished Scientist and Ohloh Kudos Rank 9.