Software Unscripted

Richard talks with Lucas Rosa, a compiler engineer working on the Aiken programming language for smart contracts, about tradeoffs in language and compiler design, property-based testing, syntax and familiarity, and compile-time evaluation of constants.

Richard talks with Louis Pilfold, creator of the Gleam programming language, about the language's 1.0 release, as well as other topics like backwards compatibility, hot-swapping code in production, and implementing a typed version of Erlang's famous OTP system, which had also been famously considered to be un-typeable.

Richard talks to Thorsten Ball, a programmer at Zed Industries and author of two books on compilers. They start out talking about the differences between compilers and interpreters, what the trickiest parts are of teaching compilers, and then end up talking about the unnecessary complexity that has taken over modern Web Development.

Richard talks with Rust Analyzer creator Alex Kladov (aka matklad) about compilers, including ways they can do incremental compilation, memory management strategies, modules and boundaries, and even monomorphization!

Richard talks with programming teacher Greg Wilson about different types of beginner programmers and how they learn most effectively, what counterintuitive aspects of programming languages they tend to find more or less difficult to learn, and about the surprising relationship between software architecture and industrial design.

Richard talks with Ayaz Hafiz, a contributor to the Roc programming language, about a very specific topic in the Roc compiler, namely lambda set defunctionalization (including explaining what that term actually means). They then zoom out to talk about why more languages don't try to implement techniques like this in general.

Richard talks with Glauber Costa about how to implement databases that can do millions of reads per second, how hardware changes have affected the tradeoffs around relational and NoSQL databsaes, and what people mean by Big Data.

Richard talks with HTMX creator Carson Gross about some of the ways in which modern web development has arguably regressed over the past 15 or so years, as well as Hypertext, Hypermedia, HyperCard, HyperView, HyperScript, and even some other topics that don't have hyper in the name.

Richard talks with Lane Wagner, a Go backend engineer and founder of boot.dev, about Go's design and about functional programming.

José Valim hosts this episode, and chats with Roc Programming Language Richard Feldman about the language.

Richard talks with Chris Nuernberger about his experiences making code run faster in the context of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and the similarities and differences between that and trying to make C++ code faster...among several other topics!

Richard talks with Casey Muratori, a game engine programmer who's known for creating the term Immediate Mode GUIs, for his Twitch series Handmade Hero, and most recently for his excellent Performance Aware Programming course. They talk about performance and the programming culture around it, how memory safety relates to progarm architecture, what Web development can learn from game development, and even some concrete improvements that could be made to, you guessed it...CSS!

Richard talks with Conor Hoekstra about how programming has changed over time - going back as far as COBOL - and speculate on the future of programming a bit.

Richard talks with Nikita Prokopov, an open-source Clojure developer and creator of the Fira Code typeface, about some of the reasons he'd felt a sense of disenchantment with the direction of software in the past, and strategies he's developed for improving things in the future.

Richard talks with Brian Carroll about his experience using WebAssembly in practice - including some of the benefits and challenges of using WebAssembly in practice, why WebAssembly adoption might not be as high as it could be today, and speculation about what the future might hold for it.

Richard talks with Matt Godbolt, author of the godbolt.org Compiler Explorer, about how certain aspects of the Compiler Explorer work, as well as "disassembling" language designs themselves - talking about reference counting optimizations, destructors and unwinding, and even defending the infamous design decision of NaN != NaN.

Richard talks to Futhark language co-creator Troels Henriksen about how to design compilers for faster performance.

Richard talks with José Valim, creator of the Elixir programming language, about the differences between gradual typing and static typing - including whether gradual is the best of both worlds.

Richard talks with Predrag Gruevski, author of the cargo-semver-checks tool for detecting accidental semantic versioning mistakes in Rust packages, as well as Trustfall, which is an incredibly flexible query engine. They talk about why semantic versioning is so especially tricky to get right in Rust, tradeoffs in different package managers' approaches to semver in general, and how his work on cargo-semver-checks motivated him to create a tool for querying data in just about any format.

Richard talks to Chris Krycho about TypeScript's unusual take on semantic versioning, and type system complexity tradeoffs between various different languages.