object-oriented programming

A long recorded seminar in which Alan Kay discusses object-oriented programming, probably from the mid-1980s. He covers the original idea of objects, messaging and the work done at Xerox.

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.

Sandi Metz argues that hidden assumptions in code are missing concepts, and shows how to name and expose them so code is easier to understand and change. It covers null objects and messages in Ruby.

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.

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.

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.

James Gosling gives a personal talk at the 50th anniversary seminar of Simula about using the language from 1974 and how it shaped his thinking. He explains how Simula's object model and coroutines influenced the design of Java.

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.

Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, interviews Alan Kay at Code Mesh. They discuss the meaning of object orientation, message passing, the META II paper, and the state of computer science.

Alan Kay's 1997 OOPSLA keynote argues that the computer revolution has not really happened yet, reflecting on how computing, objects and the web fall short of their potential.

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.

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.

A roughly ten-minute demo of Microsoft's Intentional Programming research system, showing its editor and an unusual way of working with code. It is the first of two clips cut from a longer video.

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.

Part 2 of an old Microsoft Research demo of Intentional Programming, showing the compiler side of a system that stores programs as abstract structure rather than text. The uploader says the companion editor clip is clearer.

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.

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.

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.

The first part of a series on programming in Jai, Jonathan Blow's in-development language. It covers compiling, writing hello world and using code from other files.

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.

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.

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.

The first video in Photon of Scoopex's Amiga hardware programming series. It shows how to set up an assembler and write a minimal 68000 program that waits for a left mouse click.

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.

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.

A 92-minute RMIT University seminar in which Ken Stanley argues that setting an objective can block achieving it. He presents objective-less, novelty-driven search as an alternative approach to innovation and discovery, drawing on evolutionary computation.

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.

Stuart Sierra presents the Component library for Clojure, a way to manage stateful services like database connections and thread pools without global mutable state. He draws on both functional and object-oriented principles.

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.

Bryan Cantrill of Joyent presents Manta, an internet-facing object store that lets you run compute directly on the data. The talk is peppered with ZFS history and Cantrill's trademark commentary on the industry.

A 2008 Google Tech Talk in which Slava Pestov introduces Factor, a concatenative language influenced by Forth, Lisp and Smalltalk. It covers the interactive environment, metaprogramming, and the language's modern high-level features and libraries.

Shriram Krishnamurthi's PWLConf 2019 talk on the formal notion of expressive power of programming languages, based on Felleisen's paper. It explains how to tell when a feature adds power by whether emulating it requires global rewriting.