[SGVLUG] SGVLUG Meeting on Thu 8/8 @ 7pm: "The Young Man and the C: Swallowing the Red Pill"

[Lan Dang via SGVLUG]

Hi all

Reminder that we have an SGVLUG meeting this Thursday at 7pm.  We will be at IHOP, close to the 110 FWY.  

Cross-posting with SGVHAK for folks who are into embedded programming.


This month, Dustin Laurence will be reprising his talk "The Young Man and the C: Swallowing the Red Pill",
which is aimed at experienced high-level programmers who suddenly need to use C.

We don't have any speakers lined up for the rest of the year, so if you've been itching to workshop a talk, 
speak up.

---
TIME: Thursday, Aug 8th, from 7pm to 9pm
LOCATION: IHOP, 880 S Arroyo Pkwy, Pasadena, CA
TOPIC: "The Young Man and the C: Swallowing the Red Pill"
SPEAKER: Dustin Laurence


Topic

Many good, experienced high-level language programmers do not learn C or C++ well until they suddenly need to write an FFI extension, make an emergency patch to an existing C or C++ codebase, re-implement the bottleneck component in the application stack in a fast language, take an attractive job with a low-level programming component, or otherwise move from their comfortable language of choice and swallow the Red Pill of coding closer to the machine. If you are already a programmer, you don't need to be taught how to program, and your google-fu is strong for looking up detailed syntax. Instead, this will be a crash course in leveraging skills you learned in a high-level environment and transferring them to these low-level tools, acquiring some new skills you simply never needed before, and a building a mental picture of where the road to expert, idiomatic mastery lies. We will focus on plain C because C++ is too complex to cover well in a single talk, but much of the material will apply directly to C++. Perhaps surprisingly, some of it will even make you a better programmer in your favorite comfortable, higher-level language.

Bio

Some little-known facts about Dustin Laurence:

    *  His first exposure to computers was playing Colossal Cave
Adventure and the bootleg Fortran IV version of Zork on his cousin's work mainframe using a glass teletype and a modem with a cradle for the handset.
    *  His first good programming language was C. He lies and pretends that C is where he learned to program because 8-bit BASIC is embarrassing.
    *  He once gave up trying to learn the libc low-level I/O functions from the Ultrix man pages because he thought a buffer must be some kind of abstract data type provided by the C library and he couldn't find any documentation.
    *  He once confidently predicted that Linux was a temporary fad that would be replaced by BSD for serious work once the Berkeley codebase was completely free. It's probably a good thing he doesn't gamble.
    *  He avoids social media for the same reason he doesn't do crack cocaine.
    *  These days he happily hacks Python for Spring Labs. 


Lan