program synthesis

Jack Rusher's Strange Loop 2022 talk argues that most programming languages are still designed around punchcard-era assumptions. He makes the case for live, interactive programming environments, drawing on Lisp, Smalltalk and REPL-driven development.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Gabriella Gonzalez argues that developers misunderstand marketing as deception or hype, and applies the technology-adoption ideas of Crossing the Chasm to Haskell. She looks at what keeps Haskell from reaching mainstream programmers and what a community can do about it.

A five-hour Lex Fridman interview with John Carmack covering Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, programming, games and rockets.

Lex Fridman's long podcast conversation with Chris Lattner, creator of Swift, LLVM and MLIR and co-founder of Modular. Topics include the Mojo language, the future of programming and AI, and hardware.

Jonathan Blow's LambdaConf 2025 keynote demonstrates the Jai programming language and explains its design. It includes demos of metaprogramming and tools that visualize programs.

A Lambda Days keynote by Simon Peyton Jones and Tim Sweeney introducing Verse, Epic's functional logic language for the metaverse. It covers existential variables, unification and expressions yielding multiple values.

A Lex Fridman podcast conversation with the four creators of Cursor, the AI-assisted code editor. They discuss how the editor integrates models into programming workflows, including custom completion models and techniques like speculative decoding to speed up applying edits.

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 clip of John Carmack on the Lex Fridman podcast discussing his programming setup, why he favors debuggers and IDEs, and his puzzlement at developers who avoid them.

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.

A one-minute Rheinmetall promotional demo of Oerlikon Ahead air burst ammunition, which throws a cloud of sub-projectiles to destroy small air targets.

A short video that reads out comments from the leaked Team Fortress 2 source code to show the frustration of Valve's programmers over time.

Casey Muratori's two-hour talk tracing the history of object-oriented programming back to the 1960s and examining how its ideas, and later entity component systems, came about. It is followed by a Q&A.

A 2023 LLVM Developers' Meeting keynote by Abdul Dakkak, Chris Lattner and Jeff Niu introducing Mojo, a Python-family systems language built on MLIR and LLVM for heterogeneous computing.

Louis Rossmann criticizes Apple's independent repair provider program as a PR move with invasive contract terms. He argues it does little for independent shops or customers.

Dylan Beattie's NDC London talk on code written for art, fun and curiosity rather than utility. It includes quines, live music programming with Sonic Pi, and a memorable closing.

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.

NightHawkInLight shows how to make radiative sky cooling paint from grocery and hardware store materials, including a novel calcium carbonate microsphere synthesis. The paint can cool a surface below ambient air temperature in direct sunlight without electricity.

A Wendover Productions explainer arguing that major airlines make much of their profit from loyalty programs and co-branded credit cards rather than flying. It frames airlines as quasi-banks that sell points in bulk, using United's pandemic-era loan as a hook.

Tom 7's pilot episode of a series that plays with type systems and absurd programming, presented as a parody of the GPL v3 license. It mixes a typesetting experiment with a long, story-driven intro on the origin of TeX. Source code and papers are linked from the author's site.

JetBrains interviews Zig creator Andrew Kelley about why Zig has no 1.0 after a decade, why the project left GitHub, and why it bans AI contributions. He also covers what makes Zig better than C and his views on open source.

A roughly 3.7-hour Lex Fridman podcast with Pieter Levels, the solo developer behind over 40 startups. They discuss programming, viral AI products, indie hacking and digital nomad life.

A roughly three-hour Lex Fridman podcast conversation with Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python. Topics include Python's design, the GIL, asyncio, the future of programming and AI coding tools.

Kai Lentit's comedy sketch parodying an interview with an FFmpeg enthusiast. It pokes fun at the open source command-line tool experience and video conversion woes.

Lex Fridman interviews Brian Kernighan, co-author of The C Programming Language and co-creator of AWK and AMPL. They discuss Unix, C, Go and his memoir on the history of Unix.

Hugh Jeffreys tests the iPhone 14 Pro and finds that swapping genuine parts between phones disables features, concluding that third-party repair is not really viable despite Apple's Self Service Repair program.

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.

Fons van der Plas introduces Pluto.jl, a reactive notebook for Julia that tracks references between cells and re-runs affected cells when code changes. The talk was given at JuliaCon 2020.

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.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day gives a talk to an aerospace audience, comparing how Apollo was engineered and managed with NASA's Artemis program. He raises concerns about unresolved details, the number of launches and in-orbit fuel transfer needed to reach the Moon, and the loss of institutional knowledge.

Casey Muratori argues against smart pointers and RAII, advocating grouped-element thinking, zero-is-initialization and stubs as better ways to structure memory and handle errors.

Guy Steele's classic 1998 OOPSLA keynote on how a programming language must grow with its user community. He delivers it in a playful style, starting with only monosyllabic words and defining new terms as he goes.

Lex Fridman interviews Travis Oliphant, creator of NumPy, SciPy and Anaconda, about scientific Python and its history. It runs about three hours.

Matthias Wandel tests old and new code on a range of PCs, including a new mini PC, to measure how much faster modern hardware really is. He also shows optimization techniques such as branchless code, with benchmark programs on GitHub.

A fan-made Metal Gear Solid 2 codec call using AI voice synthesis, in which the Colonel warns Raiden about using AI to censor the internet and enforce digital ID. It riffs on the game's 'Selection for Societal Sanity' conversation.

A long George Hotz livestream in which he explores the coronavirus genome and molecular biology from scratch using a browser and Python, hacking on the science in real time.