CSC News

Fidelity Investments Speakers Series Presents Douglas Crockford

Please join us on September 8th at 6 pm in Lecture Hall 1231 EBII for our 1st fall 2011 talk in the Fidelity Investments “Leadership in Technology” Executive Speakers Series.

Our special guest speaker will be Douglas Crockford, Sr. JavaScript Architect at Yahoo!. His talk topic will be “Programming Style and Your Brain.”

Douglas Crockford was born in the wilds of Minnesota, but left when he was only six months old because it was "just too darn cold". He turned his back on a promising career in television when he discovered computers. He has worked in learning systems, small business systems, office automation, games, interactive music, multimedia, location-based entertainment, social systems, and programming languages. He is the inventor of Tilton, the ugliest programming language that was not specifically designed to be an ugly programming language. He is best known for having discovered that there are good parts in JavaScript. This was an important and unexpected discovery. He also discovered the JSON Data Interchange Format, the world's best loved data format. He is now the Senior JavaScript Architect at Yahoo! and is a regular speaker at conferences on advanced JavaScript topics, and serves on the ECMAScript committee.

Abstract: Computer programs are the most complicated things that people make. Computer programs must be perfect, and people are not good at that. Given the forces that shaped our evolution, it is a miracle that we can do it at all. But there are positive choices that can reduce your error rate and enhance your beauty. This is demonstrated with JavaScript, one of our least perfect programming languages, but the lessons are universal.

The event is free and open to the public.  Ample free parking is also available.

For directions and more information, click here.