code generation

Herbert Wolverson's Roguelike Celebration 2020 talk surveying procedural map generation techniques, including integration of hand-crafted prefabs and vaults.

A DEF CON 29 talk by Richard Henderson about encoding the EICAR antivirus test string into QR codes and barcodes and scanning them at real systems. Many systems that do not expect such input misbehave or collapse, including a parking garage system.

Dan Abramov's talk on the wet codebase, using visualizations to show how removing all duplication too early produces wrong abstractions that are hard to unwind.

Pokey Rule presents Cursorless, a spoken language designed for editing code by voice, built on tree-sitter parsing with smart structural and simple token-level primitives. The talk is from Strange Loop 2023.

Douglas Crockford's code::dive 2022 talk on what the next programming language should look like. He presents ideas behind his Misty language, including message-passing actors.

Biologist Michael Levin explains the bioelectric layer that coordinates cells to build organs and bodies, showing footage of two-headed worms and introducing xenobots. He discusses implications for medicine and the nature of life.

Scott Galloway's TED talk uses data to argue that young Americans are financially worse off than earlier generations, calling it a great intergenerational theft. He covers root causes and what could change it.

Neurologist Dr. Matthew Phillips talks at Low Carb Gold Coast 2022 about fasting and ketogenic diets as therapies for cancer and neurodegenerative disease. He focuses on mitochondrial dysfunction and brain energy metabolism.

Dylan Beattie's NDC London talk on code written for art, fun and curiosity rather than utility. It includes quines, live music programming with Sonic Pi, and a memorable closing.

Dylan Beattie's conference talk explores the history and mess behind plain text: encodings, Unicode, line endings and the many ways text goes wrong. It argues that the tidy idea of plain text hides a lot of complexity underneath everyday software.

John McCall of Apple's Swift team presents at CppNow 2023 on introducing a memory-safe successor language into large C++ code bases. He argues incremental improvement of C++ hits hard limits and explains Swift's C++ interoperability for gradual migration.

Fernando Rojo explains how BeatGig reached $10M in sales with one frontend engineer by sharing code between React Native and Next.js, covering navigation, animation, theming and performance.

Bryan Hunter's GigCityElixir 2023 talk on HCA Healthcare's Waterpark system, built on Elixir/Erlang. It describes how the architecture is distributed and fault-tolerant, with a multi-datacenter cluster and runtime code swapping.

Emery Berger argues that performance is hard to measure and deliver on modern systems, showing how code layout and link order can swamp optimization effects. He presents tools that evaluate performance more reliably.

Jon Gjengset's Rust NYC talk explaining what `unsafe` in Rust actually means, why it is dangerous, and why it is sometimes necessary. He works through the Rustonomicon to separate fair concerns from overblown ones.

TJ DeVries coins the term PDE (Personalized Development Environment) to describe editors like Neovim that you shape to your own workflow. He contrasts this with out-of-the-box IDEs and discusses why customizable tools appeal to developers.

Michael Levin's keynote at the ALife 2020 conference, 'Robot Cancer', on how bioelectric signaling in embryogenesis and regeneration informs unconventional computing, cognition and the 'software of life'. He argues biology offers lessons for building adaptive machines.

Chris McCord's ElixirConf EU 2023 keynote tracing LiveView's evolution from simple form validation to full apps, with code examples and live demos of what 1.0 will offer.

Khalil Estell's CppCon 2024 talk argues C++ exceptions can reduce binary size in firmware. He digs into how exceptions work and how to shrink their code footprint on embedded platforms.

Developmental and synthetic biologist Michael Levin speaks at a Harvard Extension student event on bioelectricity, body intelligence and regenerative medicine. He discusses how cell electrical networks guide growth and form.

Rik Arends presents Makepad, a Rust UI framework, at RustNL 2023. The talk covers designing modern, GPU-fast UIs with Rust and includes live-coded demos of an IDE and a synthesizer.

A remastered recording of Will Wright's 2005 GDC talk revealing Spore, titled The Future of Content. He covers procedurally generated content and the ambitions of the game, with gameplay demo starting around 12:30.

Lawyer and musician Damien Riehl argues that music is math with a finite number of melodies, and describes how he and programmer Noah Rubin generated every possible melody and released them under CC0 to avoid accidental infringement claims.

A Lambda Days keynote by Simon Peyton Jones and Tim Sweeney introducing Verse, Epic's functional logic language for the metaverse. It covers existential variables, unification and expressions yielding multiple values.

Jose Valim introduces Nx, the project bringing numerical computing to Elixir, covering multi-dimensional tensors, automatic differentiation and JIT compilation to CPU and GPU.

ElixirConf EU 2023 talk by Giuseppe Castagna and Guillaume Duboc on bringing set-theoretic types to Elixir, and the benefits such a type system could offer such as catching bugs.

Chuck Moore, inventor of Forth, presents GreenArrays' 144-core asynchronous chip at Strange Loop 2013. He explains how idle cores draw almost no power and how tight code minimizes energy use.

Andrej Karpathy, then Tesla's head of AI, presents at ScaledML 2020 on how Tesla builds full self-driving using vision-based neural nets and fleet data collection. He covers training custom detectors and neural nets gradually replacing traditional code.

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.

Fons van der Plas introduces Pluto.jl, a reactive notebook for Julia that tracks references between cells and re-runs affected cells when code changes. The talk was given at JuliaCon 2020.

David Guillot describes how his team replaced a two-year-old React UI of their SaaS product with Django templates and htmx in a couple of months. The talk gives concrete indicators on code size, performance and team impact.

Ophthalmologist Chris Knobbe argues that excess omega-6 seed oils are a unifying cause of chronic diseases of civilization such as diabetes and macular degeneration. He presents the case at Low Carb Denver 2020.

Tom 7's pilot episode of a series that plays with type systems and absurd programming, presented as a parody of the GPL v3 license. It mixes a typesetting experiment with a long, story-driven intro on the origin of TeX. Source code and papers are linked from the author's site.

Konrad Malawski's Strange Loop 2023 talk shows how the FoundationDB team adopted Swift incrementally in a C++ codebase. It covers Swift's C++ interoperability, which let them move single functions or entire types over one at a time.

RustConf 2020 closing keynote by Sian Griffin that dives into Pokemon Blue glitches, notably Missingno and arbitrary-code-execution tricks. It uses them to explain how memory unsafety works and how memory-safe languages like Rust prevent such bugs.

Joe Armstrong's Strange Loop 2013 talk on building large scalable systems from small isolated parallel components. It covers detecting and correcting errors at run time, changing code while it runs, and how Erlang embodies these principles.

A FOSDEM 2023 talk from the Matrix team on Matrix 2.0, covering sliding sync, the Element X client rewrite and next-generation calling. It explains how Matrix aims to match the speed of proprietary messengers.

Anders Hejlsberg introduces the native port of the TypeScript compiler, written in Go, which promises roughly 10x faster tooling. He demos compiling VS Code and explains where the speedup comes from.

A JuliaCon talk by a NASA Launch Services Program engineer on modeling spacecraft separation dynamics in Julia. He describes replacing a Simulink-based workflow for checking launch vehicle separation requirements with Julia and ModelingToolkit, with large speedups and much shorter code.

Chandler Carruth's CppNow 2023 talk describes Carbon as a successor language to C++ rather than a superset, focusing on C++ interop and a path to memory safety in large existing codebases. It explains why Carbon takes a different approach from Cpp2 and Circle.