programming history

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.

The first lecture of Stanford's CS107 Programming Paradigms, taught by Jerry Cain, giving an overview of the course. The course goes from C and assembly through C++, concurrency, Scheme and Python.

Steve Blank's Computer History Museum lecture argues that Silicon Valley's roots lie in WWII radar and electronic warfare work, Stanford's Fred Terman and Cold War military funding rather than the semiconductor alone.

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.

Tom Wildenhain's guest lecture for CMU's Esoteric Programming Languages course shows that PowerPoint transitions and slides are Turing complete without macros, building up to a mind-bending fractal ending.

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 lecture of Stanford's CS106A Programming Methodology by Mehran Sahami, giving a course overview and starting on programming. The course teaches software engineering principles using Java.

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.

Simon Peyton Jones gives Churchill College's annual computer science lecture on Haskell's birth and evolution. He covers the most influential ideas, from laziness to monads and type system evolution, plus current developments and guesses about the future.

Chris Shore of the Centre for Computing History explains how Colossus was built, how it worked, and how it affected the course of World War II. It is an hour-long museum lecture on the codebreaking computer.

A 1997 Computer History Museum lecture in which Larry Tesler and Chris Espinosa recount how the Apple human interface was born, from the Lisa through the Macintosh. It covers design decisions such as discoverability and the standard editing keys.

Gabriel Lebec's Fullstack Academy talk introduces lambda calculus syntax, the history of mathematical logic, and the essence of functional programming using JavaScript. It also covers combinators, currying and Church encodings.

Erik Demaine's MIT 6.006 lecture introducing dynamic programming through Fibonacci numbers and shortest paths. It covers memoization, subproblems and optimal substructure.

Dan Britt lectures on the history of climate, covering orbital cycles, ice ages and conditions millions of years ago. It frames current climate debate with deep-time context.

Political economist Mark Blyth gives a lecture tracing two versions of capitalist 'software': the postwar Great Compression era and the neoliberal era from 1980 to 2008. He explains the bug that crashed the first and the design of the second.

Yaron Minsky of Jane Street gave this talk to Harvard's OCaml-based CS51 class in 2010. It collects advice on being an effective ML programmer in an industrial setting.

Sean Carroll gives a Royal Institution talk tracing the history of quantum mechanics from Einstein and Bohr to today. He covers the Copenhagen interpretation and the many worlds interpretation.

The first lecture of MIT's 1986 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, given by Harold Abelson, introducing Lisp and the idea of computer science as the study of process.

The full 1973 BBC Lighthill debate on artificial intelligence, featuring James Lighthill, Donald Michie, Richard Gregory and John McCarthy. It documents the argument that preceded the 1970s AI winter and includes early robot demos.

Brian Kernighan gives a talk at the University of Nottingham on how to succeed in language design without really trying. He draws on his experience with awk and other languages.

A 1990 lecture by James Gosling on NeWS, Sun's networked window system in which clients send PostScript programs to the server for execution. It covers the high-level imaging model and compares NeWS with similar systems.

Bill Hammack of engineerguy introduces his series on Michael Faraday's lectures on The Chemical History of a Candle. He describes the free companion book and the commentary and caption features that help modern viewers.

An ESOTERICA episode tracing Yahweh from a warrior-storm god near Mt Seir to the god of the Israelites in the Judean highlands. It examines how Yahwism absorbed and contended with Canaanite religion.

A lecture by Commodore Grace Hopper on the future of computing, posted by MIT Lincoln Laboratory. It includes her well-known nanosecond wire demonstration and humorous comparisons of device latencies.

Ian Piumarta's 2007 Stanford EE380 lecture on building a dynamic programming environment from the ground up, from the Viewpoints Research Institute's work. It covers the design of a language and system with a recursive design, parsing through code generation, and the COLA architecture.

Simon Peyton Jones's first lecture on types in Haskell from the Oregon Programming Languages Summer School 2013. It covers type classes and how they relate to OOP, subtyping and polymorphism.

The first class of Timothy Snyder's Yale course on the making of modern Ukraine. It introduces the course and asks what it means for a nation to exist in light of the Russian invasion.

An eight-minute excerpt of a 1983 video featuring Seymour Papert, creator of Logo, on children learning programming and abstract ideas through embodied play. It shows kids acting out the Logo turtle.

A detailed 40-minute explanation of the ultraviolet catastrophe, covering Rayleigh and Jeans' classical treatment of blackbody radiation and Planck's quantum hypothesis. It follows the Eisberg and Resnick textbook treatment.

A December 2005 guest lecture by Mark Zuckerberg in Harvard's CS50, discussing Facebook's early days, its technical choices and computer science. It captures him as a 21-year-old founder before Facebook's rise.

Lecture 1B of MIT's 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1986) with Gerald Sussman, covering procedures, processes and the substitution model. It includes the line about the power of naming things.

Robert Wills of TNMoC explains the Apollo Guidance Computer hardware and software, then walks through the Apollo 11 landing procedure step by step, including the 1202 alarms.

The first lecture of MIT's 6.001 (SICP) with Abelson and Sussman, giving an overview of the course and an introduction to Lisp. It argues that computer science is about managing complexity and abstraction, not computers.

Microsoft's Brian Beckman gives an hour-long, whiteboard-style walk through monads, building from function composition and monoids using school-level math. It is aimed at practicing programmers rather than category theorists.

The first lecture in Bartosz Milewski's category theory series for programmers. It covers the motivation and philosophy behind category theory and why composition matters for handling complexity.

A 2018 lecture, with subtitles available, by former Finnish intelligence colonel Martti J. Kari on Russian strategic culture. He walks through the historical layers of Russia and explains why the country behaves as it does.

Casey Muratori's University of Twente guest lecture is a case study in how straightforward code can cut thousands of lines and tens of seconds of runtime down to a few dozen lines running in under a second. It uses concrete examples to show why software is often an order of magnitude slower than it should be.

Part two of Alan Kay's Stanford Startup School lecture on inventing the future. He draws on his time at Xerox PARC and elsewhere to discuss how to think about new technology and what makes ideas useful.

Casey Muratori's 2005 video introducing immediate-mode GUIs as an alternative to retained widget toolkits. He explains the motivation and shows minimal-state button logic.

Archaeologist Eric Cline lectures on the Late Bronze Age collapse around 1177 BC, when interconnected Mediterranean empires fell in rapid succession. He discusses the Sea Peoples and the combined causes of the collapse.