Can Great Programmers Be Taught? Dr. John Ousterhout

People have been programming computers for more than 80 years, but there is little agreement on how to design software or even what a good design looks like. As a community, we talk a lot about tools and processes, but hardly at all about design. In this talk I will describe my recent work to identify and communicate a set of software design principles, including a new software design course at Stanford that is taught more like an English writing seminar than a traditional programming class, and a book on software design, which is based on the concepts from the class. I will also present a few of the design principles, such as "classes should be deep" and "define errors out of existence." [John Ousterhout](https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/home.php) is a professor of computer science at Stanford University. He is the author of [A Philosophy of Software Design](https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Software-Design-2nd/dp/173210221X).