Okay, another post in the tour of skipped over noteworthy things I’ve been a part of. Previously, I wrote about writing programs in other human languages (among other things). Here, I’m talking about the talk Tim and I gave last year at Clojure/conj 2023, which is about transpiling a program from one programming language to another (among other things). Ha! No, it’s not the same at all. And our talk is actually the important lessons that we learned from our work, and we crafted our presentation content & style to be accessible. Hopefully, you will come away with at least one useful insight, even if you don’t know programming, or scroll further down this post for my written “director’s cut commentary”:
Tim really insisted on being deliberate about the presentation style and pushing us (especially) me out of my comfort zone to do so. It really paid off, IMO. We basically followed How to Speak, and it really applies to real life (very little was specific to academia research talks).
I mean, just like Patrick Winston said in “How to Speak”, did you notice that many Democratic National Convention 2024 speeches ended with a salute to the audience instead of saying “thank you” ?! No? The only thing you remember from the DNC 2024 was Lil Jon during the Roll Call? Fair enough. Don’t overlook North Carolina, NC came right after New York and made NY look weak and tired. Yeah, you heard me! (Awesome that NY had Spike & DA Tish James in the front. But Gov. Hochul can kick rocks for freezing Manhattan congestion pricing right before the finish line.)
I think the overall effect worked out well. When I hear people give their strong advice about presentations or rules of thumb about number of slides for a given time length, I love seeing their reaction when I tell them that Tim & I presented 158 slides in a 40 minute time slot… with 5 minutes to spare. Almost 5 slides / minute. Having spare time for Q&A was desired but not a top priority, and despite all of our practicing leading us to believe that we would have 2.5 minutes to spare, things really do go faster when you’re in front of the audience.
I was actually the one who was really quite hesitant to bringing Thamil into our presentation. Tim rightly persisted and insisted we do so as it helps illustrate how human languages and programming languages share similar phenomena, even if they are very different things on the surface. And that’s why the streak continues of me giving presentations that make a mention of Thamil somehow, even though it’s not my intention. He also wanted to give time to small stories that can engage emotionally and convey important takeaway lessons. It was satisfying to tell my story of thriving in Scala at Nest because only my teammate and unofficial mentor Dave recognized and understood what I was doing… Everyone else, if they event noticed, just thought I was “lucky” somehow that my speed at coding never slowed down. It’s amazing how such smart people can be blinded by their own prejudices, in this case, that Clojure “looks weird” so they don’t understand my productivity was sustained by a subtle profound clarity that they refuse to see because they never allow themselves to get close.
One other personal highlight for me was creating a visual explanation of what it takes to choose the appropriate programming language for a given situation (2 mins long starting at time 11:51). I know that I’ve talked about the topic before, but being able to use Tim’s diagram tool Hummi really helped drive the point home. Tim challenged the precision of the thoughts and words on this topic (as he did elsewhere), and it really helped strengthen the final result. Why is this important? Just look at the number of new programmers who only do systems programming and get stuck thinking that Rust is the only programming language that anyone should ever need, that we should rewrite everything in Rust, etc. Ugh. Despite my best efforts to craft this argument for our presentation, the teammates of mine who are guilty of this Rust zealotry didn’t bother to watch my presentation one bit even when I said it might be useful for them. They feel they already know everything that they need to know. And that’s how smart people limit themselves — their focus on a topic leads to success but also creates a ceiling on how much they will learn of things in the wider world. If this argument can only reach the Clojure community, then at least we have done our part to instill mental clarity in that corner of the wider world.
Sequenced Thoughts from C/S 