Over the years, I've seen a variety of programming features become popular and then wane. There seems to be no end to new ones, but I have begun to wonder how much we have reflected on whether given language features delivered on their promises or not. In this talk, I'd like to turn a critical, questioning eye on our most beloved programming language features and ask whether they really have delivered a better experience to us in total, or if we've only arrived at some kind of local benefit, potentially depriving ourselves of something better.

I'm known for doing a lot of work on terse programming styles in APL. This talk will focus on the one area of APL where I feel verbosity is the only answer I have at the moment, which is event-driven code, for which I apply a technique called Sequence-based Function Specification. It just so happens to be a general strategy that can be applied to other programming languages as well, and may just help you write more reliable, consistent, and readable code for responsive applications.