Developer! Developer! Developer! East Anglia

DDD East Anglia

Saturday 21 September 2019
Cambridge, UK

Programming with yarn

Lily Madar Lily Madar

Crochet and other yarn crafts can be viewed as a form of “programming in the wild”. Without realising it, crocheters interpret their own patterns, thus becoming “computers”. This talk explores the analogies between a crafty — analogue — discipline and what we, as developers, know of programming.

It covers several notions that can be illustrated with crochet, such as: crochet patterns as programming instructions, language versioning, humans as computers/compilers, debugging, multithreading (quite literally). It also ties the discipline back to the origins of computing, and the inspiration behind Babbage’s Analytical Engine. Finally, we look at how crafts and programming can be intertwined, and create new ways to make analog and digital work together.

This talk is designed for a varied audience (new to programming or experienced), as it offers a new angle on the discipline and is language agnostic.