Symmetry in Code - Should We Care?

Victor Ciura

⏱ 20 minute session
beginner
intermediate
14:00-14:20, Friday, 19th April 2024
Why should we be concerned with symmetry? Symmetry is fascinating to the human mind and everyone likes objects or patterns that are in some way symmetrical. It is an interesting fact that nature often exhibits certain kinds of symmetry in the objects and phenomena in our Universe.

We have, in our minds, a tendency to accept symmetry as some kind of perfection. Yet it so often eludes us…

Let’s look at code and see what interesting properties emerge from various kinds of symmetries. A quest for the ‘Character of Code’, following Richard Feynman’s awe-inspiring take on physical laws.

We'll be looking to identify patterns in code, interested to see when such patterns exhibit some sort of symmetry that is advantageous in some way for reliability, performance, maintenance and discoverability.

🏷 symmetry
🏷 shape
🏷 topology
🏷 patterns
🏷 interfaces
🏷 covariance
🏷 contravariance
🏷 control flow
🏷 Lippincott
🏷 functions
🏷 async
🏷 observer
🏷 orderings
🏷 branching
🏷 procedural
🏷 operators
🏷 ranges
🏷 predicates

Victor Ciura

Victor Ciura is a Principal Engineer on the Visual C++ team, helping to improve the tools he’s been using for years. Leading engineering efforts across multiple teams working on making Visual Studio the best IDE for C++ Game developers.

Before joining Microsoft, he programmed C++ professionally for 20 years, designing and implementing several core components & libraries of Advanced Installer, improving the virtualization and repackaging technologies for MSI/MSIX.

One of his hobbies is tidying-up and modernizing aging codebases and has been known to build open-source tools that help this process: Clang Power Tools.

He’s a regular guest at Computer Science Department of his Alma Mater, University of Craiova, where he gives student lectures & workshops on using modern C++, STL, algorithms and optimization techniques.

More details: @ciura_victor & https://ciura.ro & linkedin.com/in/victor-ciura