Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake
Tony Hoare·2009·QConLondon·1 hrTony Hoare apologises for inventing the null reference in ALGOL W in 1965 — and traces the decades of crashes, bugs, and security holes that decision quietly seeded.
Procedural Programming: It's Back? It Never Went Away
Kevlin Henney·2018·ACCUHenney goes back to the sixties to show that 'procedural' was never the slur we made it into — and that much of what we call modern style is older than we think.
The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet
Alan Kay·1997·OOPSLAAlan Kay's OOPSLA keynote on how far we still are from the medium computers could be — and how much of what we call 'OOP' missed the point.
Stop Writing Dead Programs
Jack Rusher·2022·Strange LoopJack Rusher argues that most of our languages are still, accidentally, designed around the punchcard — and shows what a living programming environment could look like instead.
The Wet Codebase
Dan Abramov·2019·DeconstructAbramov on what DRY actually costs once you've lived with a too-clever abstraction — and why writing the same code twice is sometimes the right answer.
10 Things I Regret About Node.js
Ryan Dahl·2018·JSConfEURyan Dahl revisits the design decisions he wishes he could undo in Node — and uses the postmortem to introduce Deno.
Effective Programs — 10 Years of Clojure
Rich Hickey·2017·Clojure ConjRich Hickey on what a decade of Clojure has taught him about the kinds of problems most production code is actually trying to solve — and why static type systems aren't the answer he keeps hearing about.