strange loop

Konrad Malawski's Strange Loop 2023 talk shows how the FoundationDB team adopted Swift incrementally in a C++ codebase. It covers Swift's C++ interoperability, which let them move single functions or entire types over one at a time.

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.

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.

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.

Pokey Rule presents Cursorless, a spoken language designed for editing code by voice, built on tree-sitter parsing with smart structural and simple token-level primitives. The talk is from Strange Loop 2023.

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.

Philip Roberts explains the JavaScript event loop, call stack, callbacks and asynchronous behavior with live visualizations using a tool he built. It demystifies terms like non-blocking and single-threaded.

Thunderf00t, a physicist, critically assesses the Hyperloop concept, covering the vacuum, pressure, safety, and cost problems of high-speed tube travel. He argues the media accepted the claims uncritically.

Jake Archibald's JSConf.Asia 2018 talk "In the Loop" explains the browser event loop, covering tasks, microtasks, requestAnimationFrame, and how rendering interleaves with JavaScript. It uses visual walkthroughs to show why code runs in surprising orders and why setTimeout fixes are unreliable.

Chuck Spinney, a long-time associate of John Boyd, presents Boyd's thinking on the OODA loop and evolutionary epistemology. The talk runs about two and a half hours and includes Q&A.

Adam Something argues that the Hyperloop is impractical, covering the costs and engineering problems of running trains in a near vacuum compared with conventional rail and metros. The description admits some wrong numbers in the original cut.

Rich Hickey's Strange Loop 2011 keynote distinguishing 'simple' (not intertwined) from 'easy' (familiar or near at hand). It argues that software complexity comes from complecting things and that we should pick simple constructs.

Joe Armstrong, co-inventor of Erlang, gives a funny and opinionated Strange Loop talk on the tangled state of software: build tools, package managers, entropy and the physical limits of computation. He argues for ideas like naming things by content hash and throwing away your first version.

Michael Hendricks of PriceCharting shares tricks and pain points from running Prolog in production for 18 months at Strange Loop. It argues Prolog is a productive modern language beyond logic puzzles, and includes a demo of changing code mid-execution.

Evan Czaplicki's Strange Loop 2014 talk surveys the many formulations of functional reactive programming and how they relate historically and theoretically. It then shows how Elm's variant enables hot-swapping and its time-traveling debugger.

Jon Moore's Strange Loop 2017 talk argues that rate limiting is the wrong tool for protecting services from noisy clients. He proposes concurrency-based capacity management and quotas instead.

Aditya Siram introduces ATS, a statically typed ML-like language that compiles to C and offers type-safe pointer arithmetic and a full proof language. The Strange Loop talk shows off C interop, concurrency and verification features with non-trivial examples.

Devine Lu Linvega of Hundred Rabbits talks about low-power, offline computing, esoteric languages and the Uxn virtual machine, informed by years of sailing the Pacific. The talk frames computing sustainability through a permaculture lens.

Chris Granger presents Eve, a programming environment designed to be approachable for humans, at Strange Loop 2015. The talk covers the project's approach and design ideas.

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 update from the Strange Parts YouTuber on his recovery from a brain injury caused by a metal pipe while filming, and his plans for the channel.

CityNerd critiques the Las Vegas Loop, the Boring Company's tunnel transit system, arguing its design and operation are poor. The video covers how the system actually runs.

Will Wilson of FoundationDB explains how the team tested their distributed database using deterministic simulation. By running the whole system in a simulator with injected faults and reproducible seeds, they could find rare concurrency and network bugs.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, discusses the hard parts of running an open source project: online community conflict, why its patterns arise, and a cultural history of open source. He offers ideas for more civil, productive communication.

Aditya Siram introduces Shen, a small hosted Lisp with macros, a built-in Prolog and an optional type system. The talk demos a full web app moving between functional, logic and imperative styles, including turning JSON into a type with macros.

Richard Feldman describes introducing Elm into a mixed React and jQuery front-end in production, and why the result was reliable, clean and fast enough to make the back-end team jealous.

Rich Hickey's Strange Loop 2011 keynote separates 'simple' (not intertwined) from 'easy' (familiar or near at hand) and argues that software complexity comes from complecting things. It offers a vocabulary for judging designs and abstractions.

Musician Thoj performs a live looping session on the Teenage Engineering OP-1 synthesizer, building a deep house track layer by layer.

Reggie Watts performs at TED 2012, blending vocal looping, beatboxing, poetry and comedy across musical genres in a larger-than-life improvised set.

The official music video for Kylie Minogue's Come Into My World, directed by Michel Gondry, built around a looping scene with multiplying copies of Kylie.

A short, sarcastic Half as Interesting video about a tiny freight railway in Canada built to exploit a shipping regulation loophole. It explains how a track just 100 feet long counted as a railway.

The Doomsday Machine scene from Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, in which the Soviet doomsday device is explained.

A long, sarcastic critique of Elon Musk's Loop tunnel transit idea and related Boring Company and Hyperloop claims. It leans on transit-planning arguments about capacity and throughput.

Pro Magic player Luis Scott-Vargas triggers a mandatory-action infinite loop on Magic Online, and the game stalls in a non-terminating state.

A three-minute clip from Dr. Strangelove in which Mandrake and Ripper (Peter Sellers and Sterling Hayden) discuss fluoridation and 'precious bodily fluids'. It is a famous Cold War satire scene.

A four-minute clip from Dr. Strangelove in which the President and General Turgidson argue over the 'mineshaft gap' after a nuclear war. Peter Sellers and George C. Scott play it as Cold War satire.

Philip Wadler's Strange Loop talk on Propositions as Types, the link between logic and computation (the Curry-Howard correspondence). He traces its history through Church, Godel and Turing and shows how it shaped theorem provers and programming languages.

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.

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.

Peter Alvaro's Strange Loop 2015 talk argues that query languages let you state what you mean, and applies that to distributed programming. It covers Datalog, Dedalus and the Bloom lineage for reasoning about distributed systems.