Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: October 18th, 2021
Dijkstra’s Tweetstorm
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for October 18th, 2021.
In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on October 18th included Edwin Peer, Dan Cross, Ryan Zezeski, Tom Lyon, Aaron Goldman, Simeon Miteff, MattSci, Nate, raycar5, night, and Drew Vogel. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
- Dijkstra’s 1975 “How do we tell truths that might hurt?” EWD 498 tweet > PL/1 > belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set
The use of
cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence
is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums - [@3:08](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=188) Languages affect the way you think It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to
: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. - [@4:33](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=273) Adam’s Perl story - The
, not to be confused with
- “You
books to learn how to do things” -
- [@9:04](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=544) Adam meets Larry Wall - [@11:59](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=719) Meeting Dennis Ritchie - “We were
excited; too excited some would say…” - [@15:04](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=904) Effects of learning languages, goals of a language, impediments to learning -
of APL and J fame,
. - Accessible as a language value -
,
-
-
- [@25:31](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=1531) Nate’s experience - Languages have different audiences - [@27:18](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=1638) Human languages - The
con-lang -
- Learning new and different programming languages - [@37:06](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=2226) Adam’s early JavaScript (
) - <SCRIPT LANGUARE="JavaScript"> circa 1996 - [@44:10](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=2650) Learning from books, sitting down and learning by typing out examples - How do you learn to program in a language? -
on learning programming through
- Rigid advice on how to learn -
, planned successor to
- ALGOL 60, was, according to
, “
” - [@50:41](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=3041) Where does Rust belong in the progression of languages someone learns? Rust is what happens when you’ve got 25 years of experience with C++, and you remove most of the rough edges and make it safer? - “Everyone needs to learn enough C, to appreciate what it is and what it isn’t” - [@52:45](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=3165) “I wish I had learned Rust instead of C++” - [@53:35](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=3215) Adam: Brown revisits intro curriculum, teaching Scheme, ML, then Java - Adam learning Rust back in 2015 (
) “First Rust Program Pain (So you can avoid it…)” Tom: There’s a tension in learning between the people who hate magic and want to know how everything works in great detail, versus the people who just want to see something useful done. It’s hard to satisfy both. - [@1:00:02](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=3602) Bryan coming to Rust - “Learn Rust with entirely too many linked lists”
- Rob Pike
Its concurrency is rooted in
, but evolved through a series of languages done at Bell Labs in the 1980s and 1990s, such as
,
, and
. - [@1:03:01](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=3781) Debugging Erlang processes. Ryan on runtime v. language - Tuning runtimes. Go and Rust - [@1:06:42](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=4002) Rust is its own build system - Bryan’s 2018 “Falling in love with Rust”
- Lisp macros,
,
,
- [@1:11:27](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=4287) The use of anthropomorphic terminology when dealing with computing systems is a symptom of professional immaturity. - [@1:12:09](https://youtu.be/D-Uzo7M-ioQ?t=4329) Oxide bringup updates -
Inter-Integrated Circuit -
Serial Peripheral Interface -
