The Essence of C++
Bjarne Stroustrup·2014·University of Edinburgh·1 hr 42 minBjarne Stroustrup walks through the same program in C++84, C++98, C++11, and C++14 — using the diff to show what C++ is actually about, and what changes when the language grows.
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.
Maybe Not
Rich Hickey·2018·Clojure ConjHickey takes aim at Maybe/Optional and the conflation of optionality with absence — arguing that wrapping types is the wrong place to encode 'I might not give this to you.'
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.
Escape from the Ivory Tower: The Haskell Journey
Simon Peyton Jones·2017·Churchill College, CambridgeSimon Peyton Jones traces Haskell from a research curiosity to an industrial language — and is candid about which ideas mattered and which ones didn't.
The History of Rust
Steve Klabnik·2016·ACMSteve Klabnik tells the story of how Rust got from Graydon Hoare's side project to a 1.0 release — and the design culture that made the language what it became.
Spec-ulation
Rich Hickey·2016·Clojure ConjHickey on versioning, breaking changes, and the quiet violence we do to downstream users when we 'fix' our APIs in place.