implicit context

Jonathan Blow gives a formal, hour-long demo of his Jai compiler focused on the implicit context feature. The context carries things like allocators through a program without explicit parameter passing, and the talk walks through the code.

Stuart Halloway argues that simplicity is objective, with a definition and etymology useful to programmers, rather than a subjective buzzword. He shows how this view informs Clojure's design and how to make programs simpler.

Rich Hickey's keynote at RailsConf 2012, a close sibling of his 'Simple Made Easy' talk. He distinguishes simple (not intertwined) from easy (familiar), and argues that software complexity comes from complecting things, with Rails-specific examples including large gem collections.

Alan Kay's 2015 talk on the power of simplicity, arguing that systems become simpler by building on more sophisticated fundamental building blocks and that big research horizons drove invention at Xerox PARC. It ranges across computing, tools and scaling software.

Rob Pike's dotGo 2015 talk argues that Go only seems simple, and that its simplicity hides real complexity that is part of the design. He explains the thinking behind Go's restraint in features.

The first lecture of Jordan Peterson's 2017 Maps of Meaning course, setting out the Cold War context for his theory of belief and culture. He introduces the narrative structure of culture and archetypal characters for the individual, the known and the unknown.

James Powell's nearly two-hour PyData talk builds up Python's data model, decorators, generators and context managers, coding live in Vim. It aims to take intermediate programmers toward real Python expertise.

The first lecture of Stanford's CS231n Winter 2016 course on convolutional neural networks for visual recognition, introducing the course and the historical context of computer vision.

Jonathan Blow speaks at UC Berkeley's CSUA about how to program independent games. He argues for keeping code simple, avoiding unnecessary work, and shipping.

Rich Hickey's Strange Loop 2011 keynote separates 'simple' (not intertwined) from 'easy' (familiar or near at hand) and argues that software complexity comes from complecting things. It offers a vocabulary for judging designs and abstractions.

Jack Diederich's PyCon 2012 talk argues that classes are overused in Python and walks through real code, refactoring away unnecessary classes, exceptions and modules. It popularized the heuristic that a class with two methods, one being __init__, should be a function.

Rob Pike presents Go Proverbs at Gopherfest 2015, a set of pithy aphorisms about Go design such as 'Clear is better than clever' and 'A little copying is better than a little dependency'.

Washington Post video of the experiment in which violinist Joshua Bell played incognito at a D.C. metro station. It asks whether commuters would notice a world-class musician in an ordinary setting.

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.

Rich Hickey's Strange Loop 2011 keynote distinguishing 'simple' (not intertwined) from 'easy' (familiar or near at hand). It argues that software complexity comes from complecting things and that we should pick simple constructs.

Tim Ewald's Clojure/conj talk uses furniture making with hand tools versus machine tools as an allegory for software. It explores how automation changes what we make and how we think about our work, and why Clojure's small set of simple tools matters.

A design essay on why products designed in Western contexts often fail when deployed in developing countries. It covers expert blindness and cultural assumptions, with examples such as malaria nets and the One Laptop Per Child project.

A re-upload of American Airlines captain Warren Vanderburgh's 1997 presentation warning that pilots who over-rely on cockpit automation lose manual flying skills and awareness. The uploader adds context from his own flying.

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.

Technology Connections explains why brown is not a spectral color but a context-dependent perception, essentially dark orange seen against brighter surroundings.

Okta developer advocate Nate Barbettini explains OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect in a roughly hour-long talk. It starts from the problems the protocols solve and walks through the flows. The description notes the implicit flow material is now out of date.

Bryan Cantrill's Monktoberfest 2016 talk on how software engineers pass knowledge down through oral tradition, from folk rhymes to programmer lore and stories like why C lacks a logical XOR. He argues for writing software with future generations in mind.

BobbyBroccoli's first of three parts on Jan Hendrik Schon, the Bell Labs postdoc whose fabricated organic semiconductor results nearly won a Nobel Prize. It covers his rise and the context around Bell Labs.

Symbolics developer Kalman Reti gives a short introductory demo of a Symbolics Lisp Machine running Genera in an emulator. It shows the context-aware command line, typed on-screen objects, and the live-editable system, including swapping in a C-compiled JPEG decoder.

Kurzgesagt compares how many people nuclear accidents have killed against other energy sources. It walks through the worst nuclear accidents and puts their death tolls in context per unit of energy.

David Beazley's PyCon 2010 talk explains how the Python Global Interpreter Lock works and shows experiments where multithreaded code runs slower, even on more cores, due to lock contention and context-switching overhead.

Bret Victor's talk proposing a new kind of maker space built for seeing and understanding a project's behavior: inside it, across time and across possibilities. It argues for scientific understanding over recipes and rules of thumb.

Raph Koster's 2014 GDC Next talk on what science says about creativity, with practical steps game designers and developers can use to be more creative. It frames creativity as applying existing patterns in new contexts.

A roughly 75-minute video essay from Ahoy's RetroAhoy series on the making and history of The Secret of Monkey Island. It covers the small LucasArts team, the game's development and its sequel.

Modern Vintage Gamer examines the claim from the Super Mario 64 decompilation project that the game shipped unoptimized, and puts it in the context of 1996 N64 development.

A short excerpt from Werner Herzog's film Lo and Behold in which Ted Nelson lays out his ideas about hypertext and interconnection. Herzog concludes that Nelson is the only sane person in computing.

Looking Glass Universe explains de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave theory (Bohmian mechanics) as an alternative to the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics. The video lays out the pros and cons of the theory and links to related videos on contextuality and entanglement.

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.

Musician Adam Neely examines whether certain keys sound sadder than others, looking at the history of tuning systems and temperaments and at how instrument timbre shapes the emotional character we hear. It draws on historical aesthetics writing and audio examples.

The first part of a four-part Channel 4 (UK) documentary series presented by Howard Goodall, this episode covers melody and why tunes affect us so deeply. It explains how melody works in Western music with historical background and music theory.

Historia Civilis tells the story of 46 BCE, the 445-day year in which Julius Caesar reformed the Roman calendar. It covers the political context, including the civil war, Cato and Cicero.

The Real News Network interview between Aaron Mate and Guardian reporter Luke Harding about Russiagate and Harding's book on alleged Russian collusion.

Tod's Workshop fires full-weight medieval arrows from a 160lb English warbow at reproduced medieval armour. Armour curator Dr Tobias Capwell, an archer and bowyer give historical context and discuss the results.

SoundHound's CEO demos Hound, a voice assistant, handling fast compound natural language queries with context and detailed criteria. The video leaked before the product's official launch.

A short clip of Jordan Peterson explaining Pareto distributions, using Soviet farm collectivization and the resulting famine as context. It also covers how outcomes concentrate in a few people.