ancient languages

Paul Biggar's Google Tech Talk on compiling and optimizing scripting languages, drawn from his work on the phc ahead-of-time PHP compiler. He covers runtime typing, aliasing and code generation challenges, and argues AOT can compete with JIT.

A SXSW talk by W Watson that uses Lacanian psychoanalysis, with nods to Zizek, to critique popular programming languages. It argues that people choose and defend languages for emotional and ideological reasons rather than rational ones.

Irving Finkel of the British Museum lectures at the Royal Institution on the invention and decipherment of cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia, and why it is so hard to translate.

A 10-minute clip from a Jonathan Blow Twitch stream in which he argues that game engines do not really need separate scripting languages. He questions the value of embedded interpreters when the main language can do the job.

Finnish YouTuber Saara improvises gibberish that mimics how various languages sound to people who do not speak them. The sentences are mostly made up, and the clip went viral.

Miniminuteman begins a long, humorous point-by-point debunking of Graham Hancock's Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse and its claims of a lost ice-age civilization. It is part one of a multi-part critique.

Dwarkesh Patel interviews ancient-DNA geneticist David Reich about human prehistory, including the small group that left Africa around 70,000 years ago and the Yamnaya expansion.

A 2001 panel with Paul Graham, John Maeda, Jonathan Rees and Guy Steele on programming language design, part of the Dynamic Languages Wizards Series.

Peter Pringle sings the opening of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Sumerian, accompanied by a reconstructed ancient instrument. The description gives background on Sumer, cuneiform and how little is known about the language's pronunciation.

Max Miller of Tasting History makes garum, the fermented fish sauce of ancient Rome, using a same-day recipe. He covers the history of the condiment along the way.

Lex Fridman's long interview with Chris Lattner, creator of LLVM and Swift, covering the future of computing and programming languages. It touches on compilers, hardware, and his work at Apple, Tesla, Google and SiFive.

A Polish linguist tests whether speakers of Bulgarian, Polish and Croatian can understand Interslavic, a constructed language built from Slavic languages. It shows how well they follow it without prior study.

An animated ranking of the most popular programming languages from 1965 to 2019, built from popularity indexes, GitHub access data and historical surveys.

Douglas Crockford's first Yahoo lecture puts JavaScript in historical context. He traces the language's structure and quirks back through the early decades of computer science and programming language history.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, examines how programming languages are funded. He looks at where compiler engineers' salaries come from, why Go has about 5 engineers while Dart has about 30, and how this limits language design.

Michael Arntzenius's Strange Loop talk on Datafun, a functional query language that brings database-style querying into a general-purpose language. It discusses bridging database theory and programming languages.

Irving Finkel of the British Museum tells how a 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablet came to him for examination. It revealed the oldest known account of Noah's Ark and led to a book and a documentary.

Richard Feldman explains how pure functional languages can match or beat imperative ones on performance. Compilers can turn immutable code into in-place mutation, avoiding naive copying. The talk draws on his work on the Roc language.

Shriram Krishnamurthi's PWLConf 2019 talk on the formal notion of expressive power of programming languages, based on Felleisen's paper. It explains how to tell when a feature adds power by whether emulating it requires global rewriting.

Ron Pressler's Curry On 2015 talk arguing that imperative languages should not be polluted with pure functional concepts like monads. He favors simple blocking code over non-blocking styles.

Scott Wlaschin's NDC Oslo talk on four 1970s languages, SQL, Prolog, ML and Smalltalk. It explains their philosophies and what practical principles they still offer modern developers.

Alan Watson Featherstone, founder of Trees for Life, describes nearly 30 years of work restoring the ancient Caledonian Forest in the Scottish Highlands, illustrated with his photography.

Eric Cline presents the thesis of his book 1177 BC on the collapse of the interconnected Late Bronze Age Mediterranean civilizations. The talk covers the Egyptians, Mycenaeans, Hittites, Canaanites and their trade networks.

A short Dyalog demonstration building Conway's Game of Life in a single line of APL, step by step. It shows how array operations replace loops.

Guy Steele's invited talk at Clojure/conj on the informal metanotation computer scientists use in papers to describe languages. He traces how this notation developed and why it is often unspecified and arcane.

A two-hour live stream in which Aaron Hsu explains the architecture, design history and aesthetic of Co-dfns, his parallel APL compiler. He walks through the code and the reasoning behind its dense style.

The first episode of Clickspring's series on reproducing the Antikythera Mechanism by hand, laying out the plan and the history. The series follows a machinist building the ancient Greek device with traditional tools and methods.

A 2007 Google Tech Talk in which Cliff Click of Azul Systems presents a lock-free concurrent hash table that scales to 768 CPUs. He explains why it is correct by reasoning in a different way than usual happens-before and memory-order arguments.

Peter Alvaro's Strange Loop 2015 talk argues that query languages let you state what you mean, and applies that to distributed programming. It covers Datalog, Dedalus and the Bloom lineage for reasoning about distributed systems.

Tom Scott plays the Royal Game of Ur against British Museum curator Irving Finkel, who deciphered its rules from a cuneiform tablet. Finkel teaches the game and explains its history as the oldest playable board game.

A three-hour Joe Rogan podcast with Randall Carlson, builder and geomythologist, on catastrophic geological events, cosmic impacts and climate at the end of the last glacial period.

Tom Wildenhain's guest lecture for CMU's Esoteric Programming Languages course shows that PowerPoint transitions and slides are Turing complete without macros, building up to a mind-bending fractal ending.

Aaron Hsu discusses design patterns and anti-patterns in APL and why the language is productive despite its write-only reputation. He argues that idioms matter more than libraries in array languages.

Devine Lu Linvega of Hundred Rabbits talks about low-power, offline computing, esoteric languages and the Uxn virtual machine, informed by years of sailing the Pacific. The talk frames computing sustainability through a permaculture lens.

Jon Purdy's Stanford EE380 seminar giving an overview of concatenative programming, from function composition theory and history down to low-level implementation and correctness benefits.

An episode of jan Misali's Conlang Critic series reviewing Toki Pona, a minimalist constructed language with about a hundred words. It is a short, humorous critique of the language's design.

The first lecture of Michael Sipser's MIT 18.404J Theory of Computation course, covering course mechanics, finite automata, regular languages and regular expressions. It proves closure of regular languages under union and begins concatenation.

Nada Amin's Strange Loop talk on programming languages that build on themselves, centered on towers of interpreters and nestable interpretation in Scheme. She shows how interpreters can be stacked and collapsed.

Historia Civilis explains the constitution of ancient Athens, including its assembly, offices and use of sortition to choose leaders. It draws on Aristotle and Plutarch.

Alan Kay argues for rethinking how computer science is taught in schools, drawing on his work on object-oriented programming and GUIs. He discusses how poorly people understand complex systems and what education could do about it.