Reputation: 2743

Great computer-science speeches

I've looked into some questions here where the "best" programming books are listed and then thought why there isn't a question concerning speeches yet. I think that speeches or presentations from developers or even creators of programming languages which were or are heavily used at some point are particulary interesting.

One of my favorite speeches was recommended to me by someone here on SO: The future of C# I also like Guido van Rossum's speeches but he sometimes seems pretty nervous. Another in my opinion good presentation would be the Google tech talk about Go.

Which (recorded) programming presentations/speeches are worth watching?

edit: Made this a community wiki as the answer would probably be a pretty long list.

Upvotes: 22

Answers (7)

Brad Rhoads

Reputation: 1846

Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About by Don Knuth Excerpt: http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/pdf/1575863278.pdf Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Things-Computer-Scientist-Language-Information/dp/157586326X

Upvotes: 2

Corin

Reputation: 2467

One of my favourites is Robert C Martin's talk on Craftsmanship and Ethics. It's basically a call to developers to act as professionals and demonstrate our pride in what we do by doing it well.

Upvotes: 1

Geoff Reedy

Reputation: 36051

Tony Hoare's Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake is pretty enlightening

Summary

Tony Hoare introduced Null references in ALGOL W back in 1965 “simply because it was so easy to implement”, says Mr. Hoare. He talks about that decision considering it “my billion-dollar mistake”.

Bio

Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare, commonly known as Tony Hoare, is a British computer scientist, probably best known for the development in 1960, at age 26, of Quicksort. He also developed Hoare logic, the formal language Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP), and inspired the Occam programming language.

Upvotes: 2

JB King

Reputation: 11910

OMG Ponies!!! (Aka Humanity: Epic Fail) is a Jon Skeet presentation that I'd consider one of the best speeches I've ever seen and the material is technical at times.

Upvotes: 5