Working Hard to Keep It Simple
Martin Odersky·2011·OSCON Java·40 minMartin Odersky on Scala's design tensions — fusing object-oriented and functional ideas without letting the surface area explode.
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.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
Propositions as Types
Philip Wadler·2015·Strange LoopPhilip Wadler on the Curry–Howard correspondence — the deep, surprising equivalence between mathematical proofs and computer programs.