coded language

Guy Steele's classic 1998 OOPSLA keynote on how a programming language must grow with its user community. He delivers it in a playful style, starting with only monosyllabic words and defining new terms as he goes.

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.

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.

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.

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 short excerpt of Rob Pike's Lang.NEXT 2014 talk where he describes Go's target audience as young Google programmers who are not researchers. The language has to be easy for them to understand and adopt.

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.

A 2008 Google Tech Talk in which Slava Pestov introduces Factor, a concatenative language influenced by Forth, Lisp and Smalltalk. It covers the interactive environment, metaprogramming, and the language's modern high-level features and libraries.

Ian Piumarta's 2007 Stanford EE380 lecture on building a dynamic programming environment from the ground up, from the Viewpoints Research Institute's work. It covers the design of a language and system with a recursive design, parsing through code generation, and the COLA architecture.

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.

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

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.

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.

Leandro Facchinetti explains why he thinks Racket is a great language and why he stopped using it. He describes his backstory and experiences with the Racket community.

Scott Meyers' keynote at DConf 2014, drawing on 25 years of C++ experience to offer the D language community a plea about what it should avoid. It centers on the accumulated complexity and pitfalls of C++ as a cautionary tale.

Julia co-creator Jeff Bezanson candidly lists fundamental problems with the language at JuliaCon 2019, including modularity, types and compiler latency, and how they might be solved.

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.

Java Language Architect Brian Goetz talks at a Clojure conference about the challenges of evolving a mature language like Java while preserving compatibility with existing code and developer expectations. It also gives a look at where the platform is headed.

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.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, talks at Curry On 2015 about user-focused language design. He explains the principles behind Elm and how to make a functional, typed language as approachable as JavaScript.

Robert Martin's RailsConf 2009 talk looks at why Smalltalk lost out despite its technical strengths. He draws lessons about language communities and arrogance that he argues could hurt Ruby too.

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.

Bryan Cantrill argues that programming languages and platforms reflect core values, and compares languages through that lens, with Rust as a main example. He draws on his experience with Solaris, DTrace and ZFS.

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.

Guy Steele's PPoPP 2017 keynote surveying the history of computer science metanotation, including BNF, inference rules, and overline notation. He argues the field's notations are inconsistent and fragmented.

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.

A 2023 LLVM Developers' Meeting keynote by Abdul Dakkak, Chris Lattner and Jeff Niu introducing Mojo, a Python-family systems language built on MLIR and LLVM for heterogeneous computing.

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.

Felienne Hermans presents Hedy, a gradual programming language for teaching kids that moves through levels from almost no syntax toward full Python. The talk covers why error messages and syntax are scary for beginners.

A Curry On talk by Lars Bak, known for V8 and Dart, on building a secure and robust IoT development platform. It discusses language and VM design choices for small devices.

Guy Steele's JuliaCon 2016 keynote on the Fortress language, its features and the lessons learned from the project.

David Ungar of IBM Research reflects at Stanford on the Self language project and argues the real legacy of ideas is the people. He covers its history, philosophy, successes and failures.

Jan Vitek of Northeastern University gives a meetup talk on the challenges of making the R language run fast. He explains what in R's semantics makes it hard to optimize and to build a JIT compiler for.

Simon Peyton Jones presents linear types for Haskell, showing how practical linearity can fit into a higher-order polymorphic language. The talk covers motivations such as resource handling and relates the ideas to Rust.

David Sanders gives the first part of a two-part introduction to the Julia programming language at SciPy 2014. It walks through the language's basics and its appeal for scientific computing.

Paul Phillips, a major Scala compiler contributor, gives a long talk on Scala collections and views, using it to critique Scala's design and direction.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, gives an elm-conf 2016 talk on the non-code side of building a language. It covers the philosophy behind Elm's development approach, including batching work and the priorities of different language communities.

John A. De Goes's Scalapeno keynote argues that Scala's popularity is declining because of compile times, complexity and compatibility problems. He proposes a path for Scala to survive, including a simplified functional subset.

An AdaCore talk on the history, present and future of the Ada language, including remarks from Robert Dewar. The title and description say little else.

Rob Pike presents the Go 2 draft specifications at the Sydney Golang Meetup, covering the Go 2 process and several proposals including generics. The Q&A contains a well-known exchange about the name of the language.