I have the small honour of being a speaker at the maiden conference of MacDev 2009, a grass-roots, independently run, Mac developer conference in the UK that’s being held in April next year. MacDev looks like it’ll be the European equivalent of C4, which was absolutely the best Mac developer conference I’ve ever been to; I’d say it’s the Mac equivalent of Linux.conf.au. If you’re a Mac developer at all, come along, it should be great fun, and give your liver a nice workout. Plus, how can you ignore such a sexy list of speakers?

Update: My talk abstract is now available…

One reason for Mac OS X’s success is Objective-C, combining the dynamism of a scripting language with the performance of a compiled language. However, how does Objective-C work its magic and what principles is it based upon? In this session, we explore the inner workings of the Objective-C runtime, and see how a little knowledge about programming language foundations—such as lambda calculus and type theory—can go a long way to tackling difficult topics in Cocoa such as error handling and concurrency. We’ll cover a broad range of areas such as garbage collection, blocks, and data structure design, with a focus on practical tips and techniques that can immediately improve your own code’s quality and maintainability.

I am a great believer in getting the foundations right. Similarly to how bad code design or architecture often leads to a ton of bugs that simply wouldn’t exist in well-designed code, building a complex system on unsteady foundations can produce a lot of unnecessary pain. What are the foundations of your favourite programming language?

It’s 2008 and we’re still seeing buffer overflows in C.