[mercer]

If this is the talk I think it is, I can say it helped me greatly as a programmer. I'm one of those 'homegrown' programmers with no formal education, and I'd probably horrify some of you with my work. But I'm learning, and very aware of my deficiencies.

What I loved about this talk is that it seemed more a 'philosophy of programming' thing, where a lot of what he said applied even to my shitty programming, and (hopefully) even improved it.

[jacquesm]

For me the biggest change was 'structured programming', Niklaus Wirth and K&R changed the way I looked at code completely. Pascal was never my favorite language but after 'Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs' I became a much better programmer pretty much overnight.

[mercer]

Haha, yeah, that's pretty much the single most useful thing I learned.