programming

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kevlin Henney revisits structured programming, from Go To Statement Considered Harmful to block-structured code and object orientation. He argues it still matters for how we write code today.

Brian Kernighan's 2009 talk at Princeton on the Elements of Programming Style, discussing readable code, avoiding cleverness and flawed examples in programming tutorials.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tef's EMF 2012 talk on lessons from a career in programming, a candid and humorous look at why programming is so often terrible. Slides and a draft script are available online.

Douglas Crockford's YUIConf 2011 keynote on why programming style matters, particularly in JavaScript. He draws on science about the brain and shows how tools like JSLint help.

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.

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.

A long livestream of George Hotz live-coding a toy SLAM implementation, twitchslam, over two days in May 2018. It is an unedited session of Python programming with computer vision and visualization.

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.

Lex Fridman interviews Donald Knuth about algorithms, complexity, The Art of Computer Programming, and his work habits. The conversation covers his approach to verifying algorithms and how he organises his time.

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.

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.

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.

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

A long George Hotz live-stream from June 2023 in which he works on tinygrad and rants about AMD's drivers, ultimately declaring he is giving up on AMD. It also touches on hardware and compiler topics.

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 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.

John Carmack's roughly three-hour QuakeCon 2013 keynote, delivered from a few bullet points. Topics include his Haskell experiments with functional programming and static typing, game state, and cloud gaming.

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.

Day 1 of Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero, a live-coded game built from scratch in C on Windows. It reviews C on Windows, sets up a minimal build system and WinMain entry point, and shows a first MessageBox.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.