programming tools

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.

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.

The Godot Engine 2022 showreel of apps and tools built with Godot, with a timestamped list of each project. It shows the engine being used well beyond games.

Alan Kay demonstrates GRaIL, a graphical input language system from around 1968 in which hand-drawn strokes become boxes, connections and dataflow-style programs.

The Academy's 2014 Sci-Tech Awards segment honoring Matt Pharr, Greg Humphreys and Pat Hanrahan for their physically based rendering work and book. The authors give a short acceptance speech that thanks Donald Knuth for literate programming.

A brief demo of the Smalltalk debugger, including defining a method that doesn't exist yet while the program is stopped mid-crash.

A short clip of Steve Jobs describing the computer as a bicycle for the mind. He compares human efficiency of travel to what computers do for mental work.

Sir Mashalot blends six formulaic pop country songs into one seamless mashup using Pro Tools. It shows how similar the songs' chords and structure are.

A short clip of a TiVo paid-programming broadcast from the early 2000s, which TiVo used to send guide data and service updates to DVRs over cable TV before broadband was common.

A one-minute NCIS scene in which two characters type on the same keyboard to fight off a hacker. It is widely mocked as absurd TV hacking.

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.

A 3-minute demo of a tiny IOCCC 2012 winning C program that simulates fluid dynamics in an 80x25 terminal, using any text (including its own source) as input. The video shows the simulation running to Handel's Water Music.

Dylan Beattie's parody of 'You Give Love a Bad Name' about hypermedia APIs and REST, performed with his band at developer conferences.

HERO is a short animated film made entirely in Blender to showcase the Grease Pencil 2D animation tools in Blender 2.8. It mixes hand-drawn 2D with a full 3D pipeline.

A short unscripted demo of writing FizzBuzz in JavaScript with a generator function on a steno keyboard, typos included. It gives a feel for what real coding in stenography looks like.

A short clip of Bill Gates demonstrating Visual Basic in 1991, showing drag-and-drop building of a Windows GUI.

A short Conan segment in which George R. R. Martin explains that he writes his Game of Thrones books on WordStar 4.0 on a DOS machine.

A recording from real hardware of Tim Follin's multichannel 1-bit music for Agent X on the ZX Spectrum. It shows several voices coaxed out of the single-bit beeper.

A kinetic typography animation for Jonathan Coulton's song 'Shop Vac', made by Jarrett Heather with Illustrator, After Effects and other tools over 500-1000 hours.

Casey Neistat's social experiment in New York City where he tries to 'steal' his own bike with various tools, showing how little stops passers-by from helping.

A four-minute 2006 explainer on trusted computing, describing what it is and whether users should support it, with a skeptical DRM angle.

Find the Longest Path is a comedic song by Daniel J. Barrett, a Billy Joel parody that describes the NP-hard longest path problem in informal terms.

A short clip from Person of Interest season 2 where Root and John gain full access to The Machine and its resources. It shows the AI guiding people with targeting data.

The official music video for Autechre's 'Gantz Graf', a dense, glitchy electronic track paired with abstract animated 3D visuals reportedly made by hand in 2002.

A three-minute capture of SORTDEMO.BAS, the sorting visualization that shipped with QBasic. It animates insertion, bubble, heap, exchange, shell and quick sort with chiptune-like sound.

A very short clip from The Matrix Reloaded in which Trinity runs nmap and then uses an SSH exploit. The scene is notable for showing a real tool.

Short BBC Earth clip from Life of Mammals in which David Attenborough shows orangutans imitating human behaviors like washing clothes with soap and using tools.

A short clip from Star Trek (2009) showing young Spock learning at a Vulcan school with an immersive, machine-driven teaching system.

A one-minute clip of the New Caledonian crow Betty bending a straight wire into a hook to retrieve food from a tube. It comes from a 2002 Science study on tool-making in crows.

A short video of someone playing Doom on a TI-83+ graphing calculator, with a link to the version used.

The official music video for Rick Astley's 1987 hit Never Gonna Give You Up, the song behind the Rickroll internet prank.

Celery Man is a short Tim and Eric sketch in which Paul Rudd uses an absurd computer interface. It is a surreal comedy bit from their show.