loop

Chuck Spinney, a long-time associate of John Boyd, presents Boyd's thinking on the OODA loop and evolutionary epistemology. The talk runs about two and a half hours and includes Q&A.

Konrad Malawski's Strange Loop 2023 talk shows how the FoundationDB team adopted Swift incrementally in a C++ codebase. It covers Swift's C++ interoperability, which let them move single functions or entire types over one at a time.

Guy Steele's Strange Loop 2010 talk argues that programmers should not have to think about parallelism, and that languages should support algorithms built on independence and divide-and-conquer. He also recounts fitting a program onto a single punch card.

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.

Michael Hendricks of PriceCharting shares tricks and pain points from running Prolog in production for 18 months at Strange Loop. It argues Prolog is a productive modern language beyond logic puzzles, and includes a demo of changing code mid-execution.

Evan Czaplicki's Strange Loop 2014 talk surveys the many formulations of functional reactive programming and how they relate historically and theoretically. It then shows how Elm's variant enables hot-swapping and its time-traveling debugger.

Jon Moore's Strange Loop 2017 talk argues that rate limiting is the wrong tool for protecting services from noisy clients. He proposes concurrency-based capacity management and quotas instead.

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.

Devine Lu Linvega of Hundred Rabbits talks about low-power, offline computing, esoteric languages and the Uxn virtual machine, informed by years of sailing the Pacific. The talk frames computing sustainability through a permaculture lens.

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.

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.

Sean Parent's GoingNative 2013 talk surveys new and overlooked C++ features and shows how to use them for simple, correct, clear code. It stresses using standard algorithms rather than raw loops.

Will Wilson of FoundationDB explains how the team tested their distributed database using deterministic simulation. By running the whole system in a simulator with injected faults and reproducible seeds, they could find rare concurrency and network bugs.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, discusses the hard parts of running an open source project: online community conflict, why its patterns arise, and a cultural history of open source. He offers ideas for more civil, productive communication.

Aditya Siram introduces Shen, a small hosted Lisp with macros, a built-in Prolog and an optional type system. The talk demos a full web app moving between functional, logic and imperative styles, including turning JSON into a type with macros.

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.

Oh The Urbanity! argues that most city dwellers live in dense residential neighbourhoods outside downtown, which can be calm and peaceful. It draws on older, denser parts of Toronto and Montreal.

A short BicycleDutch episode showing how people with disabilities use Dutch cycle tracks on hand-cycles, tricycles and mobility scooters.

Physicist Geoffrey West speaks at an FQXi conference on time about complexity and scaling laws. He covers how metabolism, growth and lifespan scale across organisms and how the same mathematics applies to cities and companies.

David Kriesel's 36C3 talk, in an English translation, analyzes a year of scraped Deutsche Bahn data covering every stop of every long-distance train in Germany. It explores delays and how punctuality is actually measured.

A recording of Andres Duany's 1991 'San Antonio By Design' seminar on suburban sprawl. He lays out how codes, zoning and policy produce sprawl and makes the case for new urbanism.

An Odd Lots podcast episode on why converting empty office buildings into apartments is hard. A managing director at Vanbarton Group walks through the zoning, financing and construction obstacles, mostly in New York.

Part one of a 1996 BBC Modern Times documentary on the training to become a London black cab driver. It follows candidates learning the Knowledge and facing stressful repeated exams with Public Carriage Office examiners.

Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns explains how a land value tax differs from an ordinary property tax, why it makes economic sense, and why it is rarely used. It is a short six-minute explainer.

A half-hour television special on the 2007 fiery collapse of a connector in the Bay Area's MacArthur Maze and its rebuilding in 26 days. It was produced for the Professional Engineers in California Government.

A short urbanism video presenting original observations of how drivers treat stop signs, to argue that cyclists rolling through them under an Idaho stop is no different. It filmed intersections in Ottawa.

A short BicycleDutch episode showing how Dutch junctions with protected cycle paths are laid out. It argues these are proven, non-experimental designs that make intersections safer for cyclists.

Oh The Urbanity! tests the theory that banning housing investors would fix affordability, using Rotterdam's ban as a case study. The video finds mixed results.

A local TV news investigation showing that many SUVs and trucks have a large blind zone directly in front, hiding children from the driver. It includes a demonstration lining kids up in front of a vehicle.

CityNerd explains why traffic congestion grows nonlinearly as more cars use a road network, and why adding road capacity tends not to fix it. It covers the consequences for drivers, bus riders, cyclists and pedestrians, and discusses alternatives such as true bus rapid transit.

Chuck Moore, inventor of Forth, presents GreenArrays' 144-core asynchronous chip at Strange Loop 2013. He explains how idle cores draw almost no power and how tight code minimizes energy use.

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.

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.

Gerald Sussman's 2011 Strange Loop keynote argues we still do not know how to compute, comparing biological systems with how we program machines. It touches on propagators, constraint programming and robustness.

Jay Parlar's Strange Loop talk shows how model checkers such as Alloy can find complex bugs in a system's design without running or reading any code. He walks through modeling architectures and checking every possible sequence of operations, including a real security bug and a UI feature-interaction bug.

Stephen Kell's Strange Loop talk argues that C and Unix already contain Smalltalk-like dynamism and introspection that can be exposed. He presents his liballocs research on bridging dynamic and compiled languages.

Nada Amin's Strange Loop talk on programming languages that build on themselves, centered on towers of interpreters and nestable interpretation in Scheme. She shows how interpreters can be stacked and collapsed.

Hillel Wayne's Strange Loop talk introducing TLA+ as a specification language for finding concurrency bugs in designs. It covers stalling, race conditions and dropped messages, with PlusCal examples.