code as data

The first lecture of Andy Pavlo's CMU 15-445 Intro to Database Systems (Fall 2019), covering course introduction and the relational model.

Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure and designer of Datomic, gives a JaxConf 2012 talk that takes apart traditional database architecture. He presents a different way to think about databases and explains the reasoning behind Datomic's fact-based design.

Mark Raasveldt of CWI presents DuckDB, an embeddable analytical database described as the SQLite for analytics, in a CMU Database Group talk. He explains why it was built, what it is for, and how it works.

Simon Peyton Jones explains nested data parallelism and Data Parallel Haskell, an approach to exploiting multicore and distributed hardware while keeping a simple single-control-flow programming model.

Peter Norvig's UBC distinguished lecture on how massive amounts of simple data, such as for language modeling, can yield understanding that hand-built models could not.

Blizzard's Timothy Ford explains in this 2017 GDC session how Overwatch uses an Entity Component System architecture for layered gameplay. He also covers its server-authoritative netcode with client-side prediction and how they keep the game responsive and fair.

David Beazley's PyCon India closing keynote, in which he live-codes a stack machine and grows it into an interpreter that runs WebAssembly, then uses it to play a Rust-written game. It requires no prior WebAssembly knowledge.

A tool-assisted speedrun of Ocarina of Time at Summer Games Done Quick 2022, using TASBot and arbitrary code execution to reach an alternate ending in about 53 minutes. The run is introduced by its creators and followed by an interview.

Edward Kmett's 2013 talk at Prezi in Budapest on succinct data structures, which store data in close to the information-theoretic minimum space while supporting fast queries. It ties together the research and walks through his Haskell succinct library.

Andreas Kling live-codes a prototype JavaScript JIT compiler for the LibJS engine used in SerenityOS and Ladybird. He builds a standalone bytecode VM, a simple interpreter, and then a simple JIT in about 80 minutes.

Rich Hickey introduces Clojure to the NYC Java Study Group in the first of a two-part talk. It covers reader syntax, core data structures, code-as-data, evaluation, special operators, functions, macros and sequences, assuming no Lisp background.

A London Haskell talk on the algebra of algebraic data types, showing how sum and product types behave like arithmetic. It frames types as numbers obeying algebraic laws.

Technology Connections tests how quickly gas, induction and standard electric stoves boil water, with CO2 measurements and a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Sean Parent's CppCon 2015 talk on better use of standard containers and the goal of having no incidental data structures. It argues that proper containers can greatly simplify code.

John Ousterhout's Netdev 0x16 keynote arguing that nearly every aspect of TCP is wrong for the datacenter, from connections and streams to reliable delivery and congestion control. He presents the case for a replacement protocol.

Malte Skarupke's C++Now 2018 talk on hash table performance, explaining why std::unordered_map is slow and memory hungry and presenting faster designs, including his bytell hash map.

Edward Kmett speaks at the Boston Haskell meetup about type classes and the design tradeoffs of global coherence compared with other approaches to implicit instances. It covers why uniqueness of instances matters for reasoning and refactoring.

Simon Peyton Jones's first lecture on types in Haskell from the Oregon Programming Languages Summer School 2013. It covers type classes and how they relate to OOP, subtyping and polymorphism.

Jason Turner's CppCon 2016 talk builds a simple Commodore 64 game using C++17, showing how constexpr and const let a modern compiler produce tight 6502 code. He walks through assembly output to show abstractions being optimized away.

The first lesson of Uncle Bob (Robert C. Martin)'s "Coding Better World Together" series. It makes the case for clean code and for treating software craftsmanship as an ethical and professional responsibility. It runs about 109 minutes.

Tsoding live-codes a JSON parser from scratch in Haskell in about 111 lines, using only the standard library. It is an edited Twitch stream that explains the intuition behind parser combinators, functors, applicatives and monads.

A CppCon 2018 talk arguing that OOP has failed to deliver on reuse and performance, and presenting data-oriented design for C++ with practical worked examples from real systems.

A Lex Fridman podcast conversation with the four creators of Cursor, the AI-assisted code editor. They discuss how the editor integrates models into programming workflows, including custom completion models and techniques like speculative decoding to speed up applying edits.

A live-coded demo by Jonathan Blow showing how to get object-system-style expressiveness in a data-oriented way, covering structure-of-arrays layouts and composition. It shows features of his Jai language that make programs fast.

Martin Odersky's JVM Language Summit 2015 talk argues that compilers can be thought of as databases. It describes design ideas for the Scala compiler and for developer tools.

Dropbox engineer Kevin Modzelewski gives a Stanford colloquium on Dropbox's history and the technical problems it faced scaling, including detailed database schema decisions.

James Powell's nearly two-hour PyData talk builds up Python's data model, decorators, generators and context managers, coding live in Vim. It aims to take intermediate programmers toward real Python expertise.

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.

Douglas Crockford's 2009 Google tech talk on the good and bad parts of JavaScript, based on his book. He argues for using a reliable subset of the language and avoiding its flawed features.

Mike Acton of Insomniac Games argues that a program's purpose is transforming data, and shows how common C++ approaches work against that in performance-critical game development. He covers cache behavior, data layout and the limits of compilers.

Juan Pedro Bolivar Puente explains immutable and persistent data structures in C++ and how they support value semantics. He presents the Immer library, rrb-trees, and a prototype text editor that opens a huge file instantly.

Cardiologist Dr. Pradip Jamnadas lectures on the rationale for dietary restriction and fasting, covering insulin resistance, glucose intolerance, and low-carb eating over about 81 minutes.

Simon Peyton Jones gives Churchill College's annual computer science lecture on Haskell's birth and evolution. He covers the most influential ideas, from laziness to monads and type system evolution, plus current developments and guesses about the future.

The first 3.5 hours of Tony Alicea's Udemy course on JavaScript's inner workings, covering topics such as first-class functions, closures, prototypal inheritance and how the language behaves under the hood.

Rhonda Patrick interviews USC gerontologist Valter Longo about fasting, the fasting-mimicking diet, and their effects on longevity, cancer, and multiple sclerosis. They discuss mechanisms such as IGF-1 and autophagy and clinical trials.

Daniel Kahneman's Talks at Google lecture on his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, covering System 1 and System 2 thinking and the psychology of judgment and decision making.

Scott Meyers explains how CPU caches work and why they matter for performance, covering cache levels, access speeds, associativity, and effects in multithreaded code. The focus is C++ and cache-aware, data-oriented programming.

David Beazley's workshop screencast builds asynchronous programming in Python from scratch, starting from callbacks and continuations and replacing threads to show how concurrency works underneath.

Lex Fridman interviews University of Glasgow chemist Lee Cronin about the origin of life, aliens, complexity and consciousness. The conversation centers on Cronin's assembly theory.

Dr. Jason Fung's talk at the 2018 CrossFit Health Conference on therapeutic fasting for weight loss. He explains why long-term weight loss is hard and tackles common myths.