Monktoberfest 2016: Bryan Cantrill - Oral Tradition in Software Engineering

Caption notes

Bryan Cantrill sees stories as a way software engineers pass down craft and values. He uses The Story of Mel, which circulated on Usenet, as an example, then discusses how recordings let later viewers hear the original storyteller. He argues that code comments can serve a similar purpose by keeping the reasons for a choice and the tradeoffs behind it next to the code, where later maintainers can find them.