Software Unscripted 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.