21 ms·

Talks that changed the way I think about programming

593 points by greywolve 10y ago

gravypod 10y ago
> Iterating over a two dimensional array by row is much faster than by column. Another fun fact is staggering array accesses is faster then linear acesses.
- Swizec 10y ago
  I wonder if this is language or even compiler dependent. Are there things that transpose memory organization? I for one always get confused which index is the row and which is the column when coding. Every damn time I've done a 2D iteration in the last 15+ years. Is it [col][row] or [row][col] ... I imagine it depends.
  - yaantc 10y ago
    Indeed it does depend, some languages are row major (C, C++) while others are column major (Fortran, and some common HPC libraries are in Fortran). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row-_and_column-major_order https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row-_and_column-major_order
  - patrickdavey 10y ago
    I'm not alone!!!!!! :) I was having brain melting with today's http://adventofcode.com/2016/day/8 http://adventofcode.com/2016/day/8 I'm attempting everything in Elixir and it's quite different from what I'm used to!
  - andrioni 10y ago
    >Are there things that transpose memory organization? Not exactly what you asked, but if you look at most subroutines in linear algebra libraries like LAPACK, they tend to have extra arguments so you can tell if your inputs are already transposed and/or conjugate in order to have more efficient memory access.
- Namrog84 10y ago
  Can someone elaborate on this? I tried searching and wasn't having any luck. I always thought sequential linear access was fastest?
  - dozzie 10y ago
    I'm not that low-level programmer, but my guess would be loading to CPU cache a whole memory segment at once.
  - dreta 10y ago
    This is all nonsense. Accessing linear memory in a linear fashion is the way to go. You gain absolutely nothing by staggering memory accesses, because you’re waiting for memory to come into cache while the CPU idles, and since you have little control over how cache is utilised across a span of time, the whole concept of doing this to pre-load anything is just bogus, unless you’re doing specific optimisations for a specific architecture, even then there are cache pre-loading instructions for that.
  - gravypod 10y ago
    This will technically only work on pipelined architectures of which all major CPU architectures are one. You will be able to see a significant boost to performance given the following are all true: * You have no inter dependancy of information across the lines * All your data is in the cache * You don't have instructions generated between the two lines that will require some sort of operand forwarding Basically, if you already have the stuff in the cache, the calculation is invarent to the last calculation, and you have a processor capable of it you'll see a large speed improvement. There is a great talk about this [0] (for the exact moment go to [1]). If you're interested further I'd very much recommend finding some sort of GOOD computer architecture class. Luckily now we have a fantastic resource to locate these such courses [2]. This seems like dark magic and many programmers refuse to come to terms with it's existence. Check out `dreta`'s comment to see an example. Now I do agree with dreta, this is VERY much architecture dependant but most architectures would benifit from this sort of optimization. Pretty much all modern Intel and AMD CPU's caches are large enough, they support a big enough cache, and they also all have pipelines under the hood. Intel started this in the pentium series with a 5-stage-pipeline (which I find very funny due to the GHz wars that came from that time period desipte the pipeline being probably the pargest performance boon in most cases that you would want to brag about). [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e08kOj2kISU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e08kOj2kISU [1] - https://youtu.be/e08kOj2kISU?t=26m50s https://youtu.be/e08kOj2kISU?t=26m50s [2] - https://github.com/Developer-Y/cs-video-courses#computer-organization-and-architecture https://github.com/Developer-Y/cs-video-courses#computer-org...
nottorp 10y ago
It would be nice if you linked transcripts where available...
dkarapetyan 10y ago
I know most of these. The common theme is emphasis on solving problems instead of getting caught up in religious wars over "the one true way".
ivank 10y ago
Garret Smith - Writing Quality Code in Erlang https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQyt9Vlkbis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQyt9Vlkbis
joaorico 10y ago
Alan Kay's intro quote is from this interview to Dr.Dobb's [0]. Here's some more context to that quote: "Binstock: Are you still programming? Kay: I was never a great programmer. That's what got me into making more powerful programming languages. I do two kinds of programming. I do what you could call metaprogramming, and programming as children from the age of 9 to 13 or 14 would do. I spend a lot of time thinking about what children at those developmental levels can actually be powerful at, and what's the tradeoff between…Education is a double-edged sword. You have to start where people are, but if you stay there, you're not educating. Extracting patterns from today's programming practices ennobles them in a way they don't deserve The most disastrous thing about programming — to pick one of the 10 most disastrous things about programming — there's a very popular movement based on pattern languages. When Christopher Alexander first did that in architecture, he was looking at 2,000 years of ways that humans have made themselves comfortable. So there was actually something to it, because he was dealing with a genome that hasn't changed that much. I think he got a few hundred valuable patterns out of it. But the bug in trying to do that in computing is the assumption that we know anything at all about programming. So extracting patterns from today's programming practices ennobles them in a way they don't deserve. It actually gives them more cachet. The best teacher I had in graduate school spent the whole semester destroying any beliefs we had about computing. He was a real iconoclast. He happened to be a genius, so we took it. At the end of the course, we were free because we didn't believe in anything. We had to learn everything, but then he destroyed it. He wanted us to understand what had been done, but he didn't want us to believe in it. Binstock: Who was that? Kay: That was Bob Barton, who was the designer of the Burroughs B5000. He's at the top of my list of people who should have received a Turing Award but didn't. The award is given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), so that is ridiculous, but it represents the academic bias and software bias that the ACM has developed. It wasn't always that way. Barton was probably the number-one person who was alive who deserved it. He died last year, so it's not going to happen unless they go to posthumous awards. It's like the problem Christian religions have with how to get Socrates into heaven, right? You can't go to heaven unless you're baptized. If anyone deserves to go to heaven, it's Socrates, so this is a huge problem. Binstock: I don't think they do that. Kay: They should. It's like the problem Christian religions have with how to get Socrates into heaven, right? You can't go to heaven unless you're baptized. If anyone deserves to go to heaven, it's Socrates, so this is a huge problem. But only the Mormons have solved this — and they did it. They proxy-baptized Socrates. Binstock: I didn't realize that. One can only imagine how thankful Socrates must be. Kay: I thought it was pretty clever. It solves a thorny problem that the other churches haven't touched in 2,000 years." [0] http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/interview-with-alan-kay/240003442 http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/interview-with-alan-kay/240003442
stock_toaster 10y ago
The following talk about event sourcing (not listed in the article)•, really made an impact on me: Event Sourcing - Greg Young https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHGkaShoyNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHGkaShoyNs •: Not that I really expected it to be I guess.
- JOURNEYSA 10y ago
  Overly complicated pointless eventsourcing wasted 1mil+ at my previous employer. Now they have to spend 6 months removing it all.
  - SanderMak 10y ago
    Care to elaborate? We're having quite good experiences with it at the moment, but would like to learn from others.
    - JOURNEYSA 10y ago
      We used this mess of a library, which provides no clear interface and corrupts data https://github.com/johnbywater/eventsourcing https://github.com/johnbywater/eventsourcing
      - jasonm23 10y ago
        I'll go out on a limb here and say it wasn't Event Sourcing that caused the problems. Anything can be ^H^H^H^Hmessed up.
      - maxaf 10y ago
        A faulty implementation doesn't necessarily invalidate the idea. I also strongly suggest looking into statically typed languages. Python is very poorly suited to working with data.
        strictfp 10y ago
        Yes, but even so it's a huge undertaking to build your own event sourcing. Many get burnt.
awongh 10y ago
This one by Bret Victor (or any of his other talks, really) also come to mind: https://vimeo.com/36579366 https://vimeo.com/36579366
- unixhero 10y ago
  Yeah. Firstly, maybe lastly, the conclusion of this video is real powerful stuff. I cannot pinpoint it's philosophical anchoring or origin. The same message was at the end of the iconic documentary about Jodorowskis Dune. But I have been trying to mentally operationalize the advice and ideas here, but found it really dificult and abstract. Obviously an incredible lecture that deserves its own category.
yazaddaruvala 10y ago
Anyone have a link to Alan Kay's talk, where he demos UIs and a compiler for UIs in ridiculously small # lines of code? There are a few talks like this, but there is one in particular where he goes into a lot of detail about it. I can't for the life of me find it again.
- dkarapetyan 10y ago
  Is it really "Complex"? Or did we just make it "Complicated"? : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY
  - corysama 10y ago
    Btw: The next iteration of that project live here: https://github.com/harc/ohm https://github.com/harc/ohm
pjc50 10y ago
The theological second half of this is bizarre - I've never heard of this being considered a "problem", heaven (in the Christian tradition) is not a hall of fame that one nominates figures for. And the Mormon tradition of proxy-baptising people who are dead and never showed any sign of adherence to their tenets is highly questionable.
- WhitneyLand 10y ago
  Did you just criticize a religion for not making sense?
  - paulddraper 10y ago
    > The weirdest thing about Mitt Romney is that crazy religion. Mormons believe Joseph Smith received gold plates from an angel on a hill, when everybody knows Moses got stone tablets from a burning bush on a mountain. http://www.cc.com/video-clips/cw4el2/the-colbert-report-yahweh-or-no-way---mormons---god-s-poll-numbers http://www.cc.com/video-clips/cw4el2/the-colbert-report-yahw...
    - icantdrive55 10y ago
      That, and criticizing Obamacare, considering his state was the inventor of the flawed system to begin with. (Just letting for profit insurance companies call the shots, with no caps on premiums. I like most of Obamcare. I know Rebublicans wouldn't let anything through if Obama didn't allow for profit insurance essentially ruin the bill. Obama compromised to get a bill passed. It was this, or nothing. And look what insurance companies did. Shameful?) And showing no moral integrity by kissing Trumps hand now. I have never figured out what this guy really cares about. Yea, he was a nice young man. Most popele were once nice young men.
- jpt4 10y ago
  In the particular case of Socrates, one might speculate that he had the privilege of affirming or denying his faith before Christ himself: http://biblehub.com/1_peter/3-19.htm http://biblehub.com/1_peter/3-19.htm
unwind 10y ago
Fun to see Eskil (there's a typo but that's how you spell it) on here, that talk isn't very old. It would be interesting with some more analysis from the OP, namely what was learned that changed their thinking, and how their thinking was changed.
- greywolve 10y ago
  This is a great idea, I'll definitely be doing some followup posts in future.
- corysama 10y ago
  If you haven't seen Eskil's very old video "Developing the Technology Behind 'Love'" you definitely should. In it, he describes the tech design choices he made that made it feasible for him to develop an MMO as a solo project. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f90R2taD1WQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f90R2taD1WQ
edem 10y ago
I really like that my two favorites from Rich Hickey are present. If you don't watch any of these you should at least watch 'Simple made easy'.
- calebm 10y ago
  I clicked the link just to see if I was correct in predicting that "Simple made easy" was on the list. It's on my list, and seems to be on everybody's list. It reminds me of that quote: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." (Mark Twain)
  - dj-wonk 10y ago
    Rich has great talks. However, I am not sure if what the author wrote ("Your most powerful problem solver is your subconscious mind.") is a spot-on articulation of what Rich means by hammock driven development. Here's my summary of what Rich means: immersive, focused thinking followed by unstructured, relaxed, open-ended thinking. It is the combination of the two that is so powerful.
joemanaco 10y ago
These are exactly the talks that had the most influence to the way I write software, too. Great list!
navyad 10y ago
Thanks for sharing.
Insanity 10y ago
I always hugely enjoy these lists, thanks for sharing this one as well. Great material in there :-)
GeertVL 10y ago
I love this quote from Eskill's talk "C++ is evil because it makes dumb people think they are clever." Replace C++ with any "intelligent" framework or language.
- rcaught 10y ago
  Replace "evil" and "dumb" with "high and mighty, naive, hyperbole".
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
hellofunk 10y ago
I just watched the Blow talk. I had never seen him talk before and was really impressed by his perspective. I found myself agreeing with many of his points in a way that I never would have a couple years ago. I love how his main metric for optimization is developer time more than anything. I've learned how important this is in recent years.
thristian 10y ago
I suspect a lot of these video are the most powerful when you encounter them at exactly the time you happen to be wrestling with those same ideas yourself. Every time I design software, I'm think back to Gary Bernhardt's "Boundaries" talk¹ and his practical, concrete suggestions for writing testable code. But I've never met anybody else who seemed as impressed as I was by the idea. ¹: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/boundaries https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/boundaries
- leblancfg 10y ago
  Yup, that talk is gold. He's started producing screencasts again, and live streaming some on twitch. https://m.twitch.tv/gary_bernhardt/videos/all https://m.twitch.tv/gary_bernhardt/videos/all
- irrationalfab 10y ago
  I consider that talk one of the most interesting about programming and I consider it underrated as well.
- irrationalfab 10y ago
  I consider that talk one of the most interesting about programming and I consider it underrated as well.
- johndubchak 10y ago
  Thanks for posting this. I just finished watching it and thought it was a great talk with some really forward thinking on organizing functional designs.
- chiefalchemist 10y ago
  Thx for this.
tinco 10y ago
These talks are a little skewed to the game/high performance programming side of the art, but still very interesting in general. Of the ones I've already seen I really like Mike Acton's talk. Since this has become such a nice thread some additions I'd add: * Sandi Metz going through the Gilded Rose or "All the small things" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE I already subscribed to her programming style and the general Ruby TDD/BDD movement, but this talk captures all the important values in a single example. I think it made my programming style no longer based on vague things like experience or intuition, but just on concrete merit shown in this talk. * Matthew Brecknell demonstrating Hole Driven Development https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52VsgyexS8Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52VsgyexS8Q The programming style demonstrated in this video is a real mind bender. I think most Haskell programmers use a weaker version of this, Matthew takes it to the extreme. I didn't adapt this style, I don't think it's practical, but it's the sort of thing that some person someday will incorporate in some more comfortable way in a new language or platform as a revolutionary feature.
- rntz 10y ago
  The "hole-driven" development style originated in dependently typed languages such as Agda and Idris, which I imagine Matthew's video was inspired by. So if you want to experience it right now, go learn Agda and use agda-mode in emacs. (Probably something similar exists for Idris. I don't know whether Coq has a notion of "holes".)
  - chriswarbo 10y ago
    idris-mode for Emacs does similar tricks ( https://github.com/idris-hackers/idris-mode https://github.com/idris-hackers/idris-mode ) and I've heard it's very nice. The Idris REPL itself can do hole-based programming too, which can then be dumped out to a file (:m to list holes, :p to prove a hole, :a to write proofs to disk) http://docs.idris-lang.org/en/latest/reference/repl.html http://docs.idris-lang.org/en/latest/reference/repl.html
- chriswarbo 10y ago
  > I don't think it's practical, but it's the sort of thing that some person someday will incorporate in some more comfortable way in a new language or platform as a revolutionary feature. As mentioned below, this can be used in languages like Agda and Idris; they also give you proof search, which tries to automatically fill in the holes from available definitions. This works well for 'proof objects' (the name given to values which only exist to satisfy the type checker), but requires caution for values with 'computational content' (those values which can effect the resulting computation). Pretty much all Haskell code (except the really wacky astronautical stuff) has computational content, so there are fewer "obvious" obligations to fill in than would appear in a proof (in fact, due to laziness and lack of totality, we can safely use 'undefined' for all proof objects, since they'll never be pattern-matched!). For example, if our function needs to return a list (e.g. if we're writing a function like map, filter, iterate, replicate, cycle, etc.), a proof search will immediately give us the empty list '[]', which is correctly typed but probably wrong. For Haskell, tools like djinn can get you a little hole-filling automation, and I think that Emacs modes like ghc-mod and intero support calling out to djinn (I can't test this, as I can't get either to work on NixOS :( ). For a little more work, you could write properties for QuickCheck (/SmallCheck/LazySmallCheck/etc.) to constrain the behaviour, which would allow trivial solutions like the empty list to be ruled out automatically. If you're a TDD disciple, then you already wrote these properties, so this part would actually be free (as long as the automation tooling exists). At that point you're basically doing inductive functional programming, so tools like IGOR2 or MagicHaskeller might be useful to plug in as well.
crdoconnor 10y ago
These two made an impression on me, especially regarding the delicate trade off between implicit and explicit. Among other things, how and why to making things more implicit: http://youtube.com/watch?v=wf-BqAjZb8M http://youtube.com/watch?v=wf-BqAjZb8M (Beyond PEP8 by Raymond Hettinger) When implicit goes too far: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat (wat by Gary Bernhardt)
troels 10y ago
I'll just leave this here: * Growing a Language, by Guy Steele https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0
- jeremiep 10y ago
  I loved that talk! I especially loved the moment when I finally understood the point he's trying to make is applied to the writing of the very talk he's giving.
Flimm 10y ago
Are the start times on these YouTube links deliberate? Some of these link to the middle of the video, and I'm not sure why.
tchow 10y ago
He mentioned a lie of: Code should be designed around a model of the world but I didn't hear any reason why not to? The Key/Value pair being the only reason, but besides that being a optimization / preoptimization in high performance applications, is there any reason to not design code around a model of the world? Seems to me it makes things easier to think about.
- vanderZwan 10y ago
  Well, you could argue that Acton instead argues that the data should be designed around a model of the world, and the code around that data. Although I concede that sounds like a nitpick.
- pc86 10y ago
  I can't (won't) watch YouTube at work, but don't two of the lies contradict? If code is not more important than data, doesn't it make sense to model the code around that data? Or am I conflating data in lie #3 with "the world" in lie #2?
- speeder 10y ago
  I am trying to make a game that follows Mike Acton ideas. Basically: When you try too hard to fit the real world into code, you end with OOP. It has one great advantage: it is easy to translate real world into "computer". but one great big distvantage: a computer is a computer, not real world, OOP translates to complexity (think "Architecture Astronauts", and spaghetti of pointers/references/virtual/inheritance) and things done in a way that harms performance (not a problem for smaller problems, but if your problem is not small...) His idea is that you should instead fit the world into your DATA, not your code, think about what data your program needs from the real world (do you really need all tiny details for example?), what is your inputs and outputs, and THEN you code to make that work, you code around your data structures, file formats, etc... not the other way around.
- b3spoke 10y ago
  Apologies, haven't watched the video, but there are some pitfalls when designing around a 'model of the world', especially in OO. I think Wizards and Warriors by Eric Lippert is a perfect illustration of how our initial assumptions and models aren't often the right ones (although it's not so much about data in this case) https://ericlippert.com/2015/04/27/wizards-and-warriors-part-one/ https://ericlippert.com/2015/04/27/wizards-and-warriors-part...
pc86 10y ago
When I was consulting full time, I happened to run into this video at exactly the right time. I shed two toxic clients and a few weeks later negotiated the largest contract I ever had to that point (and honestly, since). Mike Monteiro: "F* you, pay me" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U
comboy 10y ago
Relevant HN thread that is a goldmine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12637239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12637239
pbadenski 10y ago
Additional two on "software design and evolution" that were hugely influential for me in my career: * Responsive design, by Kent Beck https://www.infoq.com/presentations/responsive-design https://www.infoq.com/presentations/responsive-design * The Grand Unified Theory, by Jim Weirich https://vimeo.com/10837903 https://vimeo.com/10837903
SonicSoul 10y ago
tried listening to why OOP is bad and it was painful. 10 minutes in and 0 insights. He kept saying things like "encapsulation doesn't work" and then moving on. Not willing to stay another 20 min to find out why.
- wheaties 10y ago
  There are many talks about why OOP is "bad" but they tend to come from the FP camp The decent talks of this nature are backed up by firm, fundamental reasoning showcasing the power of "better" abstractions. I, personally, find both OOP and FP compelling, depending on what I'm trying to model. Wish I could link a few examples, sorry.
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- jstimpfle 10y ago
  I vehemently disagree with you. He goes about in a very structured and objective style and you can also tell he has decades of experience to make informed statements. I think it's super interesting. It might be not much news when you consider only the title statement, but it's the reasoning that talks are watched for, right?
- lojack 10y ago
  Watching his solution was the most painful part. His solution is to remove functions and put everything inline, and adding comments in the place of function names. To me, this sounds like a testing nightmare. It also sounds like a readability and maintainability nightmare.
  - jstimpfle 10y ago
    Solution to what? I think you are missing the context of his statement here. Inlining functionality to very large procedures has the advantage that it makes obvious that there are no moving parts. You look at a few lines and know exactly the execution context. This improves readability a lot. Maybe just try it before calling it a nightmare. Most things in life have pros and cons, the difficulty is to decide what to do in which situations. Don't take anything too seriously or idealistically. Try to understand from the perspective of an honest presenter and apply your own judgement.
spacemanmatt 10y ago
I gotta throw in one of my favorites, because I have not seen another that really speaks so directly to the value of craftsmanship in development. I also deeply enjoyed the allegory with woodworking tools. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShEez0JkOFw&t=13s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShEez0JkOFw&t=13s
d1sciple 10y ago
Guy Steele's, Sean Parent's C++ talks and Alex Stepanov's A9 course.

593 points by greywolve 10y ago

> Iterating over a two dimensional array by row is much faster than by column. Another fun fact is staggering array accesses is faster then linear acesses.

Swizec 10y ago
I wonder if this is language or even compiler dependent. Are there things that transpose memory organization? I for one always get confused which index is the row and which is the column when coding. Every damn time I've done a 2D iteration in the last 15+ years. Is it [col][row] or [row][col] ... I imagine it depends.
- yaantc 10y ago
  Indeed it does depend, some languages are row major (C, C++) while others are column major (Fortran, and some common HPC libraries are in Fortran). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row-_and_column-major_order https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row-_and_column-major_order
- patrickdavey 10y ago
  I'm not alone!!!!!! :) I was having brain melting with today's http://adventofcode.com/2016/day/8 http://adventofcode.com/2016/day/8 I'm attempting everything in Elixir and it's quite different from what I'm used to!
- andrioni 10y ago
  >Are there things that transpose memory organization? Not exactly what you asked, but if you look at most subroutines in linear algebra libraries like LAPACK, they tend to have extra arguments so you can tell if your inputs are already transposed and/or conjugate in order to have more efficient memory access.
Namrog84 10y ago
Can someone elaborate on this? I tried searching and wasn't having any luck. I always thought sequential linear access was fastest?
- dozzie 10y ago
  I'm not that low-level programmer, but my guess would be loading to CPU cache a whole memory segment at once.
- dreta 10y ago
  This is all nonsense. Accessing linear memory in a linear fashion is the way to go. You gain absolutely nothing by staggering memory accesses, because you’re waiting for memory to come into cache while the CPU idles, and since you have little control over how cache is utilised across a span of time, the whole concept of doing this to pre-load anything is just bogus, unless you’re doing specific optimisations for a specific architecture, even then there are cache pre-loading instructions for that.
- gravypod 10y ago
  This will technically only work on pipelined architectures of which all major CPU architectures are one. You will be able to see a significant boost to performance given the following are all true: * You have no inter dependancy of information across the lines * All your data is in the cache * You don't have instructions generated between the two lines that will require some sort of operand forwarding Basically, if you already have the stuff in the cache, the calculation is invarent to the last calculation, and you have a processor capable of it you'll see a large speed improvement. There is a great talk about this [0] (for the exact moment go to [1]). If you're interested further I'd very much recommend finding some sort of GOOD computer architecture class. Luckily now we have a fantastic resource to locate these such courses [2]. This seems like dark magic and many programmers refuse to come to terms with it's existence. Check out `dreta`'s comment to see an example. Now I do agree with dreta, this is VERY much architecture dependant but most architectures would benifit from this sort of optimization. Pretty much all modern Intel and AMD CPU's caches are large enough, they support a big enough cache, and they also all have pipelines under the hood. Intel started this in the pentium series with a 5-stage-pipeline (which I find very funny due to the GHz wars that came from that time period desipte the pipeline being probably the pargest performance boon in most cases that you would want to brag about). [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e08kOj2kISU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e08kOj2kISU [1] - https://youtu.be/e08kOj2kISU?t=26m50s https://youtu.be/e08kOj2kISU?t=26m50s [2] - https://github.com/Developer-Y/cs-video-courses#computer-organization-and-architecture https://github.com/Developer-Y/cs-video-courses#computer-org...

nottorp 10y ago

It would be nice if you linked transcripts where available...

dkarapetyan 10y ago

I know most of these. The common theme is emphasis on solving problems instead of getting caught up in religious wars over "the one true way".

ivank 10y ago

Garret Smith - Writing Quality Code in Erlang https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQyt9Vlkbis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQyt9Vlkbis

joaorico 10y ago

Alan Kay's intro quote is from this interview to Dr.Dobb's [0]. Here's some more context to that quote: "Binstock: Are you still programming? Kay: I was never a great programmer. That's what got me into making more powerful programming languages. I do two kinds of programming. I do what you could call metaprogramming, and programming as children from the age of 9 to 13 or 14 would do. I spend a lot of time thinking about what children at those developmental levels can actually be powerful at, and what's the tradeoff between…Education is a double-edged sword. You have to start where people are, but if you stay there, you're not educating. Extracting patterns from today's programming practices ennobles them in a way they don't deserve The most disastrous thing about programming — to pick one of the 10 most disastrous things about programming — there's a very popular movement based on pattern languages. When Christopher Alexander first did that in architecture, he was looking at 2,000 years of ways that humans have made themselves comfortable. So there was actually something to it, because he was dealing with a genome that hasn't changed that much. I think he got a few hundred valuable patterns out of it. But the bug in trying to do that in computing is the assumption that we know anything at all about programming. So extracting patterns from today's programming practices ennobles them in a way they don't deserve. It actually gives them more cachet. The best teacher I had in graduate school spent the whole semester destroying any beliefs we had about computing. He was a real iconoclast. He happened to be a genius, so we took it. At the end of the course, we were free because we didn't believe in anything. We had to learn everything, but then he destroyed it. He wanted us to understand what had been done, but he didn't want us to believe in it. Binstock: Who was that? Kay: That was Bob Barton, who was the designer of the Burroughs B5000. He's at the top of my list of people who should have received a Turing Award but didn't. The award is given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), so that is ridiculous, but it represents the academic bias and software bias that the ACM has developed. It wasn't always that way. Barton was probably the number-one person who was alive who deserved it. He died last year, so it's not going to happen unless they go to posthumous awards. It's like the problem Christian religions have with how to get Socrates into heaven, right? You can't go to heaven unless you're baptized. If anyone deserves to go to heaven, it's Socrates, so this is a huge problem. Binstock: I don't think they do that. Kay: They should. It's like the problem Christian religions have with how to get Socrates into heaven, right? You can't go to heaven unless you're baptized. If anyone deserves to go to heaven, it's Socrates, so this is a huge problem. But only the Mormons have solved this — and they did it. They proxy-baptized Socrates. Binstock: I didn't realize that. One can only imagine how thankful Socrates must be. Kay: I thought it was pretty clever. It solves a thorny problem that the other churches haven't touched in 2,000 years." [0] http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/interview-with-alan-kay/240003442 http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/interview-with-alan-kay/240003442

stock_toaster 10y ago

The following talk about event sourcing (not listed in the article)•, really made an impact on me: Event Sourcing - Greg Young https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHGkaShoyNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHGkaShoyNs •: Not that I really expected it to be I guess.

JOURNEYSA 10y ago
Overly complicated pointless eventsourcing wasted 1mil+ at my previous employer. Now they have to spend 6 months removing it all.
- SanderMak 10y ago
  Care to elaborate? We're having quite good experiences with it at the moment, but would like to learn from others.
  - JOURNEYSA 10y ago
    We used this mess of a library, which provides no clear interface and corrupts data https://github.com/johnbywater/eventsourcing https://github.com/johnbywater/eventsourcing
    - jasonm23 10y ago
      I'll go out on a limb here and say it wasn't Event Sourcing that caused the problems. Anything can be ^H^H^H^Hmessed up.
    - maxaf 10y ago
      A faulty implementation doesn't necessarily invalidate the idea. I also strongly suggest looking into statically typed languages. Python is very poorly suited to working with data.
      - strictfp 10y ago
        Yes, but even so it's a huge undertaking to build your own event sourcing. Many get burnt.

awongh 10y ago

This one by Bret Victor (or any of his other talks, really) also come to mind: https://vimeo.com/36579366 https://vimeo.com/36579366

unixhero 10y ago
Yeah. Firstly, maybe lastly, the conclusion of this video is real powerful stuff. I cannot pinpoint it's philosophical anchoring or origin. The same message was at the end of the iconic documentary about Jodorowskis Dune. But I have been trying to mentally operationalize the advice and ideas here, but found it really dificult and abstract. Obviously an incredible lecture that deserves its own category.

yazaddaruvala 10y ago

Anyone have a link to Alan Kay's talk, where he demos UIs and a compiler for UIs in ridiculously small # lines of code? There are a few talks like this, but there is one in particular where he goes into a lot of detail about it. I can't for the life of me find it again.

dkarapetyan 10y ago
Is it really "Complex"? Or did we just make it "Complicated"? : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY
- corysama 10y ago
  Btw: The next iteration of that project live here: https://github.com/harc/ohm https://github.com/harc/ohm

pjc50 10y ago

The theological second half of this is bizarre - I've never heard of this being considered a "problem", heaven (in the Christian tradition) is not a hall of fame that one nominates figures for. And the Mormon tradition of proxy-baptising people who are dead and never showed any sign of adherence to their tenets is highly questionable.

WhitneyLand 10y ago
Did you just criticize a religion for not making sense?
- paulddraper 10y ago
  > The weirdest thing about Mitt Romney is that crazy religion. Mormons believe Joseph Smith received gold plates from an angel on a hill, when everybody knows Moses got stone tablets from a burning bush on a mountain. http://www.cc.com/video-clips/cw4el2/the-colbert-report-yahweh-or-no-way---mormons---god-s-poll-numbers http://www.cc.com/video-clips/cw4el2/the-colbert-report-yahw...
  - icantdrive55 10y ago
    That, and criticizing Obamacare, considering his state was the inventor of the flawed system to begin with. (Just letting for profit insurance companies call the shots, with no caps on premiums. I like most of Obamcare. I know Rebublicans wouldn't let anything through if Obama didn't allow for profit insurance essentially ruin the bill. Obama compromised to get a bill passed. It was this, or nothing. And look what insurance companies did. Shameful?) And showing no moral integrity by kissing Trumps hand now. I have never figured out what this guy really cares about. Yea, he was a nice young man. Most popele were once nice young men.
jpt4 10y ago
In the particular case of Socrates, one might speculate that he had the privilege of affirming or denying his faith before Christ himself: http://biblehub.com/1_peter/3-19.htm http://biblehub.com/1_peter/3-19.htm

unwind 10y ago

Fun to see Eskil (there's a typo but that's how you spell it) on here, that talk isn't very old. It would be interesting with some more analysis from the OP, namely what was learned that changed their thinking, and how their thinking was changed.

greywolve 10y ago
This is a great idea, I'll definitely be doing some followup posts in future.
corysama 10y ago
If you haven't seen Eskil's very old video "Developing the Technology Behind 'Love'" you definitely should. In it, he describes the tech design choices he made that made it feasible for him to develop an MMO as a solo project. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f90R2taD1WQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f90R2taD1WQ

edem 10y ago

I really like that my two favorites from Rich Hickey are present. If you don't watch any of these you should at least watch 'Simple made easy'.

calebm 10y ago
I clicked the link just to see if I was correct in predicting that "Simple made easy" was on the list. It's on my list, and seems to be on everybody's list. It reminds me of that quote: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." (Mark Twain)
- dj-wonk 10y ago
  Rich has great talks. However, I am not sure if what the author wrote ("Your most powerful problem solver is your subconscious mind.") is a spot-on articulation of what Rich means by hammock driven development. Here's my summary of what Rich means: immersive, focused thinking followed by unstructured, relaxed, open-ended thinking. It is the combination of the two that is so powerful.

joemanaco 10y ago

These are exactly the talks that had the most influence to the way I write software, too. Great list!

navyad 10y ago

Thanks for sharing.

Insanity 10y ago

I always hugely enjoy these lists, thanks for sharing this one as well. Great material in there :-)

GeertVL 10y ago

I love this quote from Eskill's talk "C++ is evil because it makes dumb people think they are clever." Replace C++ with any "intelligent" framework or language.

rcaught 10y ago
Replace "evil" and "dumb" with "high and mighty, naive, hyperbole".
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hellofunk 10y ago

I just watched the Blow talk. I had never seen him talk before and was really impressed by his perspective. I found myself agreeing with many of his points in a way that I never would have a couple years ago. I love how his main metric for optimization is developer time more than anything. I've learned how important this is in recent years.

thristian 10y ago

I suspect a lot of these video are the most powerful when you encounter them at exactly the time you happen to be wrestling with those same ideas yourself. Every time I design software, I'm think back to Gary Bernhardt's "Boundaries" talk¹ and his practical, concrete suggestions for writing testable code. But I've never met anybody else who seemed as impressed as I was by the idea. ¹: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/boundaries https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/boundaries

leblancfg 10y ago
Yup, that talk is gold. He's started producing screencasts again, and live streaming some on twitch. https://m.twitch.tv/gary_bernhardt/videos/all https://m.twitch.tv/gary_bernhardt/videos/all
irrationalfab 10y ago
I consider that talk one of the most interesting about programming and I consider it underrated as well.
irrationalfab 10y ago
I consider that talk one of the most interesting about programming and I consider it underrated as well.
johndubchak 10y ago
Thanks for posting this. I just finished watching it and thought it was a great talk with some really forward thinking on organizing functional designs.
chiefalchemist 10y ago
Thx for this.

tinco 10y ago

These talks are a little skewed to the game/high performance programming side of the art, but still very interesting in general. Of the ones I've already seen I really like Mike Acton's talk. Since this has become such a nice thread some additions I'd add: * Sandi Metz going through the Gilded Rose or "All the small things" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE I already subscribed to her programming style and the general Ruby TDD/BDD movement, but this talk captures all the important values in a single example. I think it made my programming style no longer based on vague things like experience or intuition, but just on concrete merit shown in this talk. * Matthew Brecknell demonstrating Hole Driven Development https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52VsgyexS8Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52VsgyexS8Q The programming style demonstrated in this video is a real mind bender. I think most Haskell programmers use a weaker version of this, Matthew takes it to the extreme. I didn't adapt this style, I don't think it's practical, but it's the sort of thing that some person someday will incorporate in some more comfortable way in a new language or platform as a revolutionary feature.

rntz 10y ago
The "hole-driven" development style originated in dependently typed languages such as Agda and Idris, which I imagine Matthew's video was inspired by. So if you want to experience it right now, go learn Agda and use agda-mode in emacs. (Probably something similar exists for Idris. I don't know whether Coq has a notion of "holes".)
- chriswarbo 10y ago
  idris-mode for Emacs does similar tricks ( https://github.com/idris-hackers/idris-mode https://github.com/idris-hackers/idris-mode ) and I've heard it's very nice. The Idris REPL itself can do hole-based programming too, which can then be dumped out to a file (:m to list holes, :p to prove a hole, :a to write proofs to disk) http://docs.idris-lang.org/en/latest/reference/repl.html http://docs.idris-lang.org/en/latest/reference/repl.html
chriswarbo 10y ago
> I don't think it's practical, but it's the sort of thing that some person someday will incorporate in some more comfortable way in a new language or platform as a revolutionary feature. As mentioned below, this can be used in languages like Agda and Idris; they also give you proof search, which tries to automatically fill in the holes from available definitions. This works well for 'proof objects' (the name given to values which only exist to satisfy the type checker), but requires caution for values with 'computational content' (those values which can effect the resulting computation). Pretty much all Haskell code (except the really wacky astronautical stuff) has computational content, so there are fewer "obvious" obligations to fill in than would appear in a proof (in fact, due to laziness and lack of totality, we can safely use 'undefined' for all proof objects, since they'll never be pattern-matched!). For example, if our function needs to return a list (e.g. if we're writing a function like map, filter, iterate, replicate, cycle, etc.), a proof search will immediately give us the empty list '[]', which is correctly typed but probably wrong. For Haskell, tools like djinn can get you a little hole-filling automation, and I think that Emacs modes like ghc-mod and intero support calling out to djinn (I can't test this, as I can't get either to work on NixOS :( ). For a little more work, you could write properties for QuickCheck (/SmallCheck/LazySmallCheck/etc.) to constrain the behaviour, which would allow trivial solutions like the empty list to be ruled out automatically. If you're a TDD disciple, then you already wrote these properties, so this part would actually be free (as long as the automation tooling exists). At that point you're basically doing inductive functional programming, so tools like IGOR2 or MagicHaskeller might be useful to plug in as well.

crdoconnor 10y ago

These two made an impression on me, especially regarding the delicate trade off between implicit and explicit. Among other things, how and why to making things more implicit: http://youtube.com/watch?v=wf-BqAjZb8M http://youtube.com/watch?v=wf-BqAjZb8M (Beyond PEP8 by Raymond Hettinger) When implicit goes too far: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat (wat by Gary Bernhardt)

troels 10y ago

I'll just leave this here: * Growing a Language, by Guy Steele https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0

jeremiep 10y ago
I loved that talk! I especially loved the moment when I finally understood the point he's trying to make is applied to the writing of the very talk he's giving.

Flimm 10y ago

Are the start times on these YouTube links deliberate? Some of these link to the middle of the video, and I'm not sure why.

tchow 10y ago

He mentioned a lie of: Code should be designed around a model of the world but I didn't hear any reason why not to? The Key/Value pair being the only reason, but besides that being a optimization / preoptimization in high performance applications, is there any reason to not design code around a model of the world? Seems to me it makes things easier to think about.

vanderZwan 10y ago
Well, you could argue that Acton instead argues that the data should be designed around a model of the world, and the code around that data. Although I concede that sounds like a nitpick.
pc86 10y ago
I can't (won't) watch YouTube at work, but don't two of the lies contradict? If code is not more important than data, doesn't it make sense to model the code around that data? Or am I conflating data in lie #3 with "the world" in lie #2?
speeder 10y ago
I am trying to make a game that follows Mike Acton ideas. Basically: When you try too hard to fit the real world into code, you end with OOP. It has one great advantage: it is easy to translate real world into "computer". but one great big distvantage: a computer is a computer, not real world, OOP translates to complexity (think "Architecture Astronauts", and spaghetti of pointers/references/virtual/inheritance) and things done in a way that harms performance (not a problem for smaller problems, but if your problem is not small...) His idea is that you should instead fit the world into your DATA, not your code, think about what data your program needs from the real world (do you really need all tiny details for example?), what is your inputs and outputs, and THEN you code to make that work, you code around your data structures, file formats, etc... not the other way around.
b3spoke 10y ago
Apologies, haven't watched the video, but there are some pitfalls when designing around a 'model of the world', especially in OO. I think Wizards and Warriors by Eric Lippert is a perfect illustration of how our initial assumptions and models aren't often the right ones (although it's not so much about data in this case) https://ericlippert.com/2015/04/27/wizards-and-warriors-part-one/ https://ericlippert.com/2015/04/27/wizards-and-warriors-part...

pc86 10y ago

When I was consulting full time, I happened to run into this video at exactly the right time. I shed two toxic clients and a few weeks later negotiated the largest contract I ever had to that point (and honestly, since). Mike Monteiro: "F* you, pay me" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U

comboy 10y ago

Relevant HN thread that is a goldmine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12637239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12637239

pbadenski 10y ago

Additional two on "software design and evolution" that were hugely influential for me in my career: * Responsive design, by Kent Beck https://www.infoq.com/presentations/responsive-design https://www.infoq.com/presentations/responsive-design * The Grand Unified Theory, by Jim Weirich https://vimeo.com/10837903 https://vimeo.com/10837903

SonicSoul 10y ago

tried listening to why OOP is bad and it was painful. 10 minutes in and 0 insights. He kept saying things like "encapsulation doesn't work" and then moving on. Not willing to stay another 20 min to find out why.

wheaties 10y ago
There are many talks about why OOP is "bad" but they tend to come from the FP camp The decent talks of this nature are backed up by firm, fundamental reasoning showcasing the power of "better" abstractions. I, personally, find both OOP and FP compelling, depending on what I'm trying to model. Wish I could link a few examples, sorry.
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jstimpfle 10y ago
I vehemently disagree with you. He goes about in a very structured and objective style and you can also tell he has decades of experience to make informed statements. I think it's super interesting. It might be not much news when you consider only the title statement, but it's the reasoning that talks are watched for, right?
lojack 10y ago
Watching his solution was the most painful part. His solution is to remove functions and put everything inline, and adding comments in the place of function names. To me, this sounds like a testing nightmare. It also sounds like a readability and maintainability nightmare.
- jstimpfle 10y ago
  Solution to what? I think you are missing the context of his statement here. Inlining functionality to very large procedures has the advantage that it makes obvious that there are no moving parts. You look at a few lines and know exactly the execution context. This improves readability a lot. Maybe just try it before calling it a nightmare. Most things in life have pros and cons, the difficulty is to decide what to do in which situations. Don't take anything too seriously or idealistically. Try to understand from the perspective of an honest presenter and apply your own judgement.

spacemanmatt 10y ago

I gotta throw in one of my favorites, because I have not seen another that really speaks so directly to the value of craftsmanship in development. I also deeply enjoyed the allegory with woodworking tools. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShEez0JkOFw&t=13s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShEez0JkOFw&t=13s

d1sciple 10y ago

Guy Steele's, Sean Parent's C++ talks and Alex Stepanov's A9 course.