end-user 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.

Chris Granger presents Eve, a programming environment designed to be approachable for humans, at Strange Loop 2015. The talk covers the project's approach and design ideas.

A long interview by Blender Guru with Ton Roosendaal, creator of Blender. They cover Blender's origins, the move to open source, why Ton is not driven by money, Autodesk, and what sets Blender apart from other open source projects.

Blender Guru's Andrew Price proposes a redesign of Blender's user interface, answering the usability problems raised in earlier parts of the series. He later noted the proposal had flaws and posted a follow-up.

Chris Granger, creator of Light Table and the Eve language, gives a Berkeley data science lecture on what computation and programming might look like in ten years. He covers the path that led to Eve and ends with demos.

HERO is a short animated film made entirely in Blender to showcase the Grease Pencil 2D animation tools in Blender 2.8. It mixes hand-drawn 2D with a full 3D pipeline.

Jeff Bell's Blender Conference 2018 talk on how Netflix's animated film Next Gen was produced using Blender. It covers the studio's pipeline and tooling.

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.

Edwin Brady, creator of Idris, presents Idris 2 and demonstrates type-driven development, where the compiler assists by filling holes and suggesting implementations from types.

A short talk by Will Dayble of Squareweave arguing that you should design software as if the user were drunk: distracted, impaired in attention and vision, and prone to misreading. It is a user experience talk built around that framing.

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.

Richard Feldman argues that functional programming is not the norm largely because of historical accidents, such as C++ popularity, platform exclusivity, marketing spend and network effects, rather than merit. He traces the history of how languages become mainstream.

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) traces the history of software from 1948 to today, looking at the problems programmers faced, how they were solved, and what mistakes the profession made. He then projects where the field is going, including professionalism and regulation.

Brian Will makes the case for procedural programming over object-oriented programming, arguing that OOP's promised encapsulation and decoupling are largely illusory. He analyzes real code examples and the problems of tying data to behavior in classes.

An episode of the Norwegian documentary series Brainwash, in which a comedian interviews academics from different sides about gender differences and gender equality. It looks at why more equal societies can still show unequal career choices.

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.

Captain Disillusion's comedic talk at the 2018 Blender Conference recounts how he uses Blender as a production tool for his VFX-debunking web series. It is part case study and part love letter to the Blender community.

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.

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.

Coffee Break analyzes about 40,000 videos from seven months of YouTube's trending tab. It examines whether trending is biased toward mainstream media and late-night shows.

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.

A short demo of Code Bubbles, an IDE interface built around editable code fragments in bubbles instead of files. It was a research prototype for Java development.

Brian Will critiques object-oriented programming and rewrites a roughly 3800-line OO program in a procedural style, cutting code and complexity. It is part of a series of OOP critiques.

First episode of the Norwegian documentary series Hjernevask, in which Harald Eia interviews researchers on the nature versus nurture debate. It focuses on the gender equality paradox and gender differences in career choice.

Richard Feldman describes introducing Elm into a mixed React and jQuery front-end in production, and why the result was reliable, clean and fast enough to make the back-end team jealous.

David Christiansen gives a Strange Loop 2018 introduction to dependent types, where one language serves for both compile-time and run-time code and programs unite with proofs. It draws on his book The Little Typer.

Gaming Historian recounts how Atari subsidiary Tengen challenged Nintendo's licensing rules with a lawsuit and unlicensed NES games, including the lockout chip fight.

An excerpt from a Bay Area Rust meetup on Servo's WebRender, which renders CSS display lists on the GPU at very high frame rates. It explains the approach and demos rendering at around 500 FPS.

Jonathan Blow's Reboot Develop 2017 talk on making game programming less terrible, discussing software bloat, slowness and the design goals behind his own programming language.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on auto lending, showing how lenders steer vulnerable buyers into subprime loans and crushing debt. It uses comedy sketches to explain the practices.

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.

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

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.

A demo excerpt from a 2016 Bay Area Rust meetup showing Servo's WebRender drawing CSS on the GPU at very high frame rates. It presents the promise of GPU-based browser rendering.

A one-minute NVIDIA research demo of foveated rendering for VR using SMI eye tracking. It renders at full detail only where the eye is looking, matching the physiology of human vision.

A short side-by-side recording by Jake Archibald of the same animation demo running in Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Servo WebRender nightlies on a 60Hz display. It shows the smoothness difference of GPU-based rendering.

Andrew Price presents at the Blender conference on the problems, politics and possible fixes for Blender's user interface, followed by a full Q&A. He argues that an interface upgrade is overdue.

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.

Bret Victor's DBX 2013 talk, delivered in the guise of a 1973 IBM engineer with an overhead projector. It surveys forgotten ideas from 1960s and early 70s computing and warns against assuming you know what you're doing.