dynamic languages

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

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.

Richard Feldman's GOTO Copenhagen 2022 talk on why dynamic languages like Python, Ruby, PHP and JavaScript rose in the 1990s and why each now has a popular static type checker. It argues that modern static typing recovers the advantages that made dynamic languages attractive.

A Foresight Institute workshop video with two talks: Shawn Douglas on nanoscale instruments for visualizing small proteins, and Bret Victor on Dynamicland. Victor's part shows biomolecular design built in his Realtalk system with physical objects.

Spencer Lisenby explains dynamic soaring, a technique that lets unpowered radio-controlled gliders reach speeds above 835 kph. He covers the physics and the design, build and flying challenges.

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.

Retired Boeing Technical Fellow Doug McLean walks through common misconceptions in aerodynamics, drawing on his book Understanding Aerodynamics. He critiques popular explanations of wing lift and rocket thrust and argues for arguing from the real physics.

A Microsoft Flight Simulator Feature Discovery episode in which CEO Sebastian Wloch explains the new aerodynamics simulation for the 2020 release.

Boston Dynamics introduces Stretch, a prototype robot that moves boxes in warehouses and distribution centers. Its mobile base lets it unload trucks, build pallets and assemble orders.

Boston Dynamics shows its humanoid robot Atlas picking up and manipulating objects, and altering the obstacle course to reach its goal. The clip demonstrates locomotion, sensing and athletic manipulation.

Erik Demaine's MIT 6.006 lecture introducing dynamic programming through Fibonacci numbers and shortest paths. It covers memoization, subproblems and optimal substructure.

Tech Ingredients explains the principles of magnetohydrodynamics and builds several demonstrations, including propelling liquid metal and electrolytes with magnets and a railgun-style setup.

Nathan Kutz presents the spatio-temporal dynamics of rotating detonation rocket engines, including combustion fronts that behave like solitons. He shows a bifurcation analysis of a multiscale model that captures the main features.

A 10-minute clip from a Jonathan Blow Twitch stream in which he argues that game engines do not really need separate scripting languages. He questions the value of embedded interpreters when the main language can do the job.

A short MIT Math Lab video showing millimetric droplets bouncing and walking across a vibrating fluid bath, guided by their own pilot waves. These droplets show diffraction, tunneling and quantized orbits, which were once thought to belong only to quantum systems.

Alex Martelli's Google Developers Day talk on classic design patterns (creational, structural and behavioral) and how they appear in Python. He stresses that patterns must be studied in the context of the implementing language.

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.

Finnish YouTuber Saara improvises gibberish that mimics how various languages sound to people who do not speak them. The sentences are mostly made up, and the clip went viral.

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.

Boston Dynamics' March 2008 video of BigDog, a four-legged robot, walking on ice and snow, climbing rubble and recovering from slips and kicks.

Bret Victor's talk on Drawing Dynamic Visualizations. It argues that visualization tools offer either the directness of hand drawing or the dynamics of programmed graphics, and shows a tool that combines both.

Flanders and Swann perform 'First and Second Law', a comic song about the laws of thermodynamics, from their 1964 stage show At the Drop of Another Hat. It sets the first and second laws to a deadpan call-and-response routine.

Lex Fridman's long interview with Chris Lattner, creator of LLVM and Swift, covering the future of computing and programming languages. It touches on compilers, hardware, and his work at Apple, Tesla, Google and SiFive.

A GoPro-recorded flight of an RC glider setting a 548 mph dynamic soaring speed record at Parker Mountain, California, using only wind gradients.

A one-minute clip of Spencer Lisenby setting a 545 mph speed record in an RC glider, the Transonic DP, using dynamic soaring. No motor is involved.

A Polish linguist tests whether speakers of Bulgarian, Polish and Croatian can understand Interslavic, a constructed language built from Slavic languages. It shows how well they follow it without prior study.

An animated ranking of the most popular programming languages from 1965 to 2019, built from popularity indexes, GitHub access data and historical surveys.

Adam Savage builds a Victorian-style rickshaw carriage for Boston Dynamics' Spot robot to pull, with him riding as passenger. The video covers the build and the engineering problems of pairing cutting-edge robotics with vintage transport, such as tuning the payload through Spot's API.

Chris Seaton talks about JRuby+Truffle, explaining how the Truffle and Graal combination optimises the tricky parts of Ruby and why it outperforms other Ruby implementations.

Curtis Poe's FOSDEM talk arguing that day-to-day Perl 6 is far simpler than its enthusiasts' talk of exotic features suggests. He compares basic math and string handling across languages.

Boston Dynamics' 2010 demo of BigDog, a quadruped robot that climbs through woods, recovers from kicks, slips on ice and jogs at 5 mph. It was an early showcase of dynamic legged locomotion.

Boston Dynamics shows its Atlas humanoid robot performing a gymnastics and parkour routine, using optimization-generated motions and a model predictive controller.

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.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, examines how programming languages are funded. He looks at where compiler engineers' salaries come from, why Go has about 5 engineers while Dart has about 30, and how this limits language design.

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.

Physicist Jean-Pierre Petit gives a long technical commentary on Russia's newly announced weapons, including the Sarmat missile, a nuclear-powered cruise missile and a nuclear MHD-propelled submarine drone.

Damian Conway's hour-long keynote at the Perl conference, On the Shoulders of Giants, showing off Perl 6 (Raku) features with history, algorithms and a quantum math operator built with grammars. It is delivered with comic flair.

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.

Jonathan Schiefer interviews Larry Wall, creator of Perl, in a 33-minute conversation. Wall discusses his self-designed linguistics degree and how language and programming overlap.

Boston Dynamics shows its Atlas humanoid robots running a parkour course with jumps, balance beams and vaults, demonstrating whole-body athletic control.