data-oriented programming

Raph Levien presents his new Rust GUI framework, built on data-oriented design and ideas from entity component systems, for the Xi editor. He weighs the approach against alternatives and discusses pros and cons.

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.

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.

Mark Bastian contrasts top-down object-oriented design with bottom-up, data-oriented design in Clojure. He models a board game as plain data plus small composable functions and compares it with a roughly 22-class OOP version.

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.

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.

Richard Feldman's elm-conf talk on designing models so that bugs from impossible application states cannot occur, using Elm's compiler and types. It demonstrates techniques for making invalid states unrepresentable.

Rafal Dittwald's Clojure/north talk shows how to move from writing Java-style code in Clojure to thinking in data-driven, functional terms. He walks through a JavaScript example, refactoring imperative code step by step into a functional core.

A five-minute excerpt of Rich Hickey's Clojure Made Simple talk, with new slides, ranting about HttpServletRequest and specificity. He argues for using generic maps instead of many specific classes and getters.

Jafar Husain's ACM keynote presents Netflix's JSON Graph and Falcor, which let web developers treat all cloud data as one virtual JSON model. It combines reactive programming with REST principles.

Sean Parent of Adobe argues that object-oriented frameworks ultimately fail to deliver scalable, high quality software and proposes combining generic and declarative programming instead. It draws on Stepanov's Elements of Programming.

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.

Peter Norvig's 2007 Google talk on theorizing from data, covering what huge datasets can do for language understanding, translation, information extraction and inference. It argues that more data often beats cleverer models.

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.

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.

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.

Jon Gjengset's 2020 PhD dissertation presentation at MIT on partial state in dataflow-based materialized views, the idea behind the Noria database. The Q&A is cut out.

Ahmon Dancy of Franz Inc explains low-level programming in Common Lisp, including off-heap data structures used in AllegroGraph to manage memory outside the garbage collector.

James Hamilton of AWS gives a Velocity 2010 keynote on datacenter infrastructure innovation, focused on power and cooling costs and a breakdown of where datacenter spending goes.

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.

Rich Hickey's talk on time, state, identity and values, arguing that mutable object-oriented modeling fits the world poorly. It lays out the thinking behind Clojure's approach to data and change.

An Alan Kay talk on programming and scaling, covering theoretical limits of code size, engineering versus tinkering, and biological cells as inspiration for object-oriented design.

Brian Bucklew of Freehold Games discusses design decisions behind Caves of Qud and Sproggiwood at IRDC 2015. The talk centers on data-driven, event-driven engine design.

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.

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.

Lukas Eder's Devoxx talk on how modern cost-based SQL optimizers rewrite and plan queries in ways developers would not expect. It argues that declarative SQL, used well, can run complex queries very fast.

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.

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.

Noel Rappin's MountainWest RubyConf talk introduces Smalltalk to Ruby programmers. He compares the two languages' object models, blocks, 1-based arrays, simple syntax and live programming environment, and walks through sample code.

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.

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.

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.

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.