Katie McLaughlin
Katie (they/them, @glasnt) has worn many different hats over the years. They have served as a Director of both the Python Software Foundation and the Django Software Foundation, and has been a core organiser of PyCon AU and PyConline, and have keynoted PyCon Australia, PyCon Taiwan, and PyCon Thailand. They were awarded the O'Reilly Open Source Award in 2017, and Honorary Lifetime Member of the New Zealand Python User's Group in 2022. When they’re not running all the things, they enjoy cooking, making tapestries, and seeing just how well various application stacks handle emoji.
Session
Programming languages are repeatedly touted to have strange edge cases. Bugbears. Footguns. Wats. The canonical 'wat' talk (https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat) shows some of these for Ruby and JavaScript, but doesn’t go into any detail into the ‘why’
In this talk, take a tour of a dozen different programming languages, from JavaScript to PowerShell, Python to Perl, Elixir and more; and see not only the ‘wat’, but the ‘why’: is it a misunderstanding based on assumption from another programming language? A compiler optimisation? A design consideration? A known bug that can’t be fixed due to backwards compatibility concerns?
Attendees will come away from this talk with a greater understanding about how to turn a ‘wat’ into a ‘why’.