programming language history

An animated ranking of the most popular programming languages from 1965 to 2019, built from popularity indexes, GitHub access data and historical surveys.

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.

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 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.

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.

Richard Feldman argues that functional programming is not the norm largely because of historical accidents, such as C++ popularity, platform exclusivity, marketing spend and network effects, rather than merit. He traces the history of how languages become mainstream.

Jonathan Blow's first talk on designing a new programming language for games, which became Jai. He explains the problems with C++ and why Go, Rust and D do not fit game development.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

An ICFP 2015 keynote on the history of Standard ML, covering its ideas, principles and culture. It traces ML from Strachey, Landin and Milner through SML's development and its interplay with OCaml.

Jonathan Blow's Reboot Develop 2017 talk on making game programming less terrible, discussing software bloat, slowness and the design goals behind his own programming language.

Jonathan Blow demos his prototype programming language, covering the base language and compile-time execution, including running a game while compiling. The video is about 70 minutes of demo followed by Q&A.

Rob Pike's October 2009 Google Tech Talk introducing Go, a new experimental systems language designed for fast builds, concurrency and garbage collection. It covers the goals, syntax and type system.

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.

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) traces the history of software from 1948 to today, looking at the problems programmers faced, how they were solved, and what mistakes the profession made. He then projects where the field is going, including professionalism and regulation.

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.

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.

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.

Guy Steele's 1998 OOPSLA keynote on designing a programming language that its users can grow. He builds the talk using only one-syllable words and terms he has defined, to demonstrate the idea.

Stephen Wolfram gives a 13-minute tour of the Wolfram Language, a symbolic, functional programming language with a built-in knowledgebase. He demos querying large datasets, interactivity and deployment.

David Ungar of IBM Research reflects at Stanford on the Self language project and argues the real legacy of ideas is the people. He covers its history, philosophy, successes and failures.

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.

A 2001 panel with Paul Graham, John Maeda, Jonathan Rees and Guy Steele on programming language design, part of the Dynamic Languages Wizards Series.

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.

An AdaCore talk on the history, present and future of the Ada language, including remarks from Robert Dewar. The title and description say little else.

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.

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.

Jonathan Blow talks at Gamelab 2018 about the design decisions behind Jai, the programming language he is building for game programmers. He covers low-friction development, quality of life and the effects of compile times.

Scott Wlaschin's NDC Oslo talk on four 1970s languages, SQL, Prolog, ML and Smalltalk. It explains their philosophies and what practical principles they still offer modern developers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jon Purdy's Stanford EE380 seminar giving an overview of concatenative programming, from function composition theory and history down to low-level implementation and correctness benefits.

David Sanders gives the first part of a two-part introduction to the Julia programming language at SciPy 2014. It walks through the language's basics and its appeal for scientific computing.

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.