array programming

Aaron Hsu's FnConf18 talk asks whether APL needs a static type system. He argues that APL's expressiveness and rapid iteration already deliver the benefits usually credited to types.

Aaron Hsu explains why programmers often find APL harder to learn than people with no programming background. He identifies eight patterns that contrast traditional software engineering practice with APL practice, starting from Ken Iverson's language design principles.

Felienne Hermans argues that Excel is the world's most popular programming language and shows how spreadsheets work as a pure functional language. She implements a few mathematical problems in spreadsheet formulas to illustrate why they are so powerful and approachable.

Aaron Hsu shows how to manipulate and transform tree data in APL using arrays and inverted tables instead of pointers. He claims much smaller code, better performance and easier parallelisation.

Jonathan Blow's Reboot Develop 2017 talk on making game programming less terrible, discussing software bloat, slowness and the design goals behind his own programming language.

A one-minute clip of Peter Norvig saying that Google found programming contest success correlates negatively or poorly with job performance. The description links to a blog post discussing it.

A 1987 talk in which John Backus, creator of Fortran, presents function-level programming and the FL language, a successor to his FP work. It is an archival recording with links to the related paper.

A panel from the Lang NEXT 2014 conference on systems programming in 2014 and beyond. Language designers including Bjarne Stroustrup and Rob Pike discuss the topic, including C++ header compile times.

Richard Feldman argues that functional programming is not the norm largely because of historical accidents, such as C++ popularity, platform exclusivity, marketing spend and network effects, rather than merit. He traces the history of how languages become mainstream.

Bret Victor's DBX 2013 talk, delivered in the guise of a 1973 IBM engineer with an overhead projector. It surveys forgotten ideas from 1960s and early 70s computing and warns against assuming you know what you're doing.

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) traces the history of software from 1948 to today, looking at the problems programmers faced, how they were solved, and what mistakes the profession made. He then projects where the field is going, including professionalism and regulation.

Felienne Hermans's Strange Loop keynote on the history and pedagogy of teaching programming. She questions exploration-only approaches like Logo and discusses research supporting explicit instruction and rote practice.

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.

Timothy Daly, an original author of the Axiom computer algebra system, talks about turning a large Common Lisp codebase into a literate program. He argues code should be written as readable manuals, and the talk was given at Write the Docs 2013.

Kevlin Henney argues that procedural programming never went away despite later paradigms such as OO and functional. He traces the history of structured programming and shows where procedural thinking still lives in modern code and why it matters for readability.

Kevlin Henney revisits structured programming, from Go To Statement Considered Harmful to block-structured code and object orientation. He argues it still matters for how we write code today.

Brian Kernighan's 2009 talk at Princeton on the Elements of Programming Style, discussing readable code, avoiding cleverness and flawed examples in programming tutorials.

Steven G. Johnson, MIT professor and FFTW co-author, gives a JuliaCon 2019 keynote on metaprogramming and staged programming in Julia, showing how it enables high-performance numerical code and when not to use macros.

Jim Weirich's RubyConf 2012 talk derives the Y combinator step by step, live-coding in Ruby lambdas. It builds up an understanding of functional programming and lambda calculus from first principles.

Andrew Kelley, creator of Zig, introduces the language at the Recurse Center's Localhost series in 2018. He covers its goals of robustness, optimality and clarity, C interop, cross-compilation and explicit allocators.

Paul Chiusano's Strange Loop 2019 talk introduces Unison, an open-source functional language for distributed, elastic systems. It covers content-addressed code identified by hashes of the syntax tree, a codebase manager, and algebraic effects called abilities.

Aditya Siram introduces ATS, a statically typed ML-like language that compiles to C and offers type-safe pointer arithmetic and a full proof language. The Strange Loop talk shows off C interop, concurrency and verification features with non-trivial examples.

Tef's EMF 2012 talk on lessons from a career in programming, a candid and humorous look at why programming is so often terrible. Slides and a draft script are available online.

Douglas Crockford's YUIConf 2011 keynote on why programming style matters, particularly in JavaScript. He draws on science about the brain and shows how tools like JSLint help.

Jonathan Blow's first talk on designing a new programming language for games, which became Jai. He explains the problems with C++ and why Go, Rust and D do not fit game development.

Part 4 of John Carmack's QuakeCon 2013 keynote, covering OpenGL, functional programming, Haskell, Lisp and Scheme, typing, multithreading, events and garbage collection.

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.

John Carmack's roughly three-hour QuakeCon 2013 keynote, delivered from a few bullet points. Topics include his Haskell experiments with functional programming and static typing, game state, and cloud gaming.

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.

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.

Dan Friedman and William Byrd demonstrate miniKanren, a logic programming system for Scheme, in an unconference talk. It includes generating programs by running relations in reverse.

Chris Granger presents Eve, a programming environment designed to be approachable for humans, at Strange Loop 2015. The talk covers the project's approach and design ideas.

Gerald Jay Sussman speaks at Dan Friedman's 60th birthday celebration about how programming helps formulate and clarify ideas. He argues that ambiguous mathematical notation hinders understanding.

A JuliaCon 2016 talk by Shashi Gowda showing an APL implementation in Julia. APL code is translated to Julia and JIT compiled to machine code.

Bret Victor's talk at CUSEC 2012 in which he argues that creators need immediate feedback and should organize their work around a guiding principle. He demonstrates live-coding and animation tools that show results as you type, and describes his own principle that creators must see what they are making.

Christian Schafmeister's Google Tech Talk on designing spiroligomer molecules and building Clasp, a Common Lisp on LLVM that interoperates with C++, to program molecular design. It covers the chemistry, automatic differentiation for force fields, and how the compiler is built.

Chris Ford builds up from a single sine wave through layered abstractions to a Bach canon, using Clojure and the Overtone audio environment. The talk shows music theory as a natural fit for functional programming.

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.

Evan Czaplicki's Strange Loop 2014 talk surveys the many formulations of functional reactive programming and how they relate historically and theoretically. It then shows how Elm's variant enables hot-swapping and its time-traveling debugger.

Tom Stuart's Ruby Manor 3 talk builds FizzBuzz using nothing but Ruby lambdas, working through Church encodings of numbers, booleans and data structures. It is a hands-on introduction to lambda calculus.