Software Unscripted

Richard talks with AI expert Shawn "swyx" Wang about all sorts of AI topics, including how it fits into IDEs, AI agent implementations, the economics of AI subscriptions, the future of AI in software, and how all of this affects software quality.This episode was sponsored by mailtrap.io - modern email delivery for developers. Try Mailtrap for free: https://l.rw.rw/software_unscripted_3Patreon supporters get ad-free episodes! https://patreon.com/SoftwareUnscriptedShawn's Latent Space Podcast - https://www.latent.space/podcast AI Engineer Conference Series - https://www.ai.engineer/ RAG - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retriev... Shawn's "WTF Happened in 2025?" site - https://wtfhappened2025.com/ Radiologist shortage - https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/hea... Intro – LLM psychosis & the Ilya Sutskever story Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

HTMX creator and Montana State University instructor Carson Gross talks to Richard about why HTMX moved from version 2 straight to version 4, API boundaries in library design, jQuery, and how the field of Computer Science education is now changing from the perspective of someone who's been teaching it for years.This episode was sponsored by mailtrap.io - modern email delivery for developers. Try Mailtrap for free: https://l.rw.rw/software_unscripted_2Patreon supporters get ad-free episodes! https://www.patreon.com/SoftwareUnscripted- HTMX - https://htmx.org/- Version 2 → Version 4 announcement https://htmx.org/essays/the-fetchening/- Shoutout to other htmx contributors: https://github.com/bencroker https://github.com/benpate https://github.com/alexpetros https://github.com/Telroshan https://github.com/MichaelWest22- Carson's hardware course - https://github.com/msu/csci-366-spring2025/blob/main/SYLLABUS.md- Big Sky Dev Conf - https://bigskydevconf.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ghostty creator and Hashicorp cofounder Mitchell Hashimoto talks with Richard about the development of that high-performance terminal emulator: how he's been building Ghostty, how he does native GUI development while sharing code across platforms, how LLMs have affected both the project and his love of coding, his thoughts on AI ethics, and more.This episode was sponsored by mailtrap.io - modern email delivery for developers. Try Mailtrap for free: https://l.rw.rw/software_unscripted_1Patreon supporters get ad-free episodes! https://www.patreon.com/SoftwareUnscripted- Ghostty nonprofit announcement - https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-non-profit- Zig programming language - https://ziglang.org- Roc programming language - https://www.roc-lang.org- Zed's Windows 95-inspired launch site - https://www.windowswen.com- Amp Code - https://ampcode.com- Wispr Flow - https://wisprflow.ai Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Gleam programming language creator Louis Pilfold talks with Richard about Gleam's design and various challenges that came up when implementing its compiler.- Gleam Language - https://gleam.run- Erlang Language - https://www.erlang.org- Elixir Language - https://elixir-lang.org- Roc Language - https://www.roc-lang.org- Hadoukenify https://github.com/reibitto/hadoukenify - presumably based on https://twitter.com/dr4goonis/status/476617165463105536- "Let-generalization: Let's not?" by Ayaz Hafiz - https://github.com/roc-lang/rfcs/blob/e4f05480ed96136395bb466bf5c241e42100bf66/0010-let-generalization-lets-not.md- "Let Should Not Be Generalised" by Simon Peyton Jones, Dimitrios Vytiniotis, and Tom Schrijvers - https://simon.peytonjones.org/let-generalised/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Harry Goldstein talks with Richard Feldman about the Lean 4 programming language's compile-time metaprogramming capabilities, including how they can be used to control elements of your IDE in realtime. They also discuss other topics like property-based testing, theorem proving, and Smalltalk.You can get ad-free episodes (including video) by supporting Software Unscripted on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/SoftwareUnscriptedThe Best New Programming Language is a Proof Assistant by Harry Goldstein - https://youtu.be/c5LOYzZx-0c?si=UnTfkczIhdoF7QkxThe Lean Programming Language - https://lean-lang.orgSimon Peyton-Jones: Escape from the ivory tower: the Haskell journey - https://youtu.be/re96UgMk6GQ?si=8xqpAS8VTQaqgbzg"Shen: A Sufficiently Advanced Lisp" by Aditya Siram - https://youtu.be/lMcRBdSdO_U?si=VOwJNeLAvnIRUm_nHypothesis Property-Based Testing library for Python - https://hypothesis.works/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jonathan Blow, creator of popular games Braid and The Witness, talks with Richard about programming language design - including the design of the programming language he's been building for game developers.Keynote & Tech Demo - https://youtu.be/IdpD5QIVOKQECS and Rust's Borrow Checker - https://youtu.be/4t1K66dMhWk"The 30 Million Line Problem" - https://youtu.be/kZRE7HIO3vk"A New Programming Language for Games" - https://youtu.be/TH9VCN6UkyQ?si=Z5cqazo4QU7AibzBRoc Programming Language - https://roc-lang.orgCasey Muratori's "Performance-Aware Programming" Course - https://www.computerenhance.com/p/welcome-to-the-performance-awareFile Pilot File Explorer - https://filepilot.tech/Ghostty Terminal - https://ghostty.org/Language Server Protocol - https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/WebAssembly Integer Sizes - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Reference/Numeric/ConstCliff Click's Sea of Nodes Compiler IR - https://github.com/SeaOfNodes/Chapters00:00 The Programming Establishment02:04 Metaprogramming05:04 Compile-Time Execution08:05 Language Feature Interoperability10:53 Compile Time Execution27:52 Cross-Compiling and FFI31:04 Determinism in Programming35:07 Balancing Power and Safety40:11 Memory Safety vs. Performance50:15 The Evolution of Software Performance55:32 Performance Awareness01:03:56 Dependencies and Version Control01:14:54 Dependency Availability Risk01:18:42 Memory Management01:24:51 Sandboxing01:30:23 Operating Systems Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with Zig Creator Andrew Kelley.- Support Zig - https://ziglang.org/zsf/- Zig's "Writergate" - https://ziglang.org/download/0.15.1/release-notes.html#Writergate- "What Color is Your Function?" by Robert Nystrom - https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-your-function/- "Asynchrony is not Concurrency" by Loris Cro - https://kristoff.it/blog/asynchrony-is-not-concurrency/- "Data alignment for speed: myth or reality?" by Daniel Lemire - https://lemire.me/blog/2012/05/31/data-alignment-for-speed-myth-or-reality/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

xz vulnerability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoorSpectre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerability)Meltdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerability)Heartbleed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeartbleedNoah on GitHub https://github.com/eeue56 - Substack https://substack.com/@eeue56 - BlueSky https://bsky.app/profile/derw-lang.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ladybird Browser - https://ladybird.orgSerenityOS - https://serenityos.orgStory of the man who used powerlifting to recover after falling off a roof https://startingstrength.com/articles/brian_jones_story.pdfStrongLifts 5x5 - https://stronglifts.com/stronglifts-5x5/Starting Strength - https://startingstrength.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with Swift, LLVM, Clang, and Mojo creator Chris Lattner about programming on the GPU and on the CPU, as well as a number of programming language design topics.Chris's "Democratizing AI Compute" blog series - https://www.modular.com/blog/democratizing-compute-part-1-deepseeks-impact-on-aiMojo https://www.modular.com/mojoRoc https://www.roc-lang.orgSoftware Unscripted episode with Futhark language creator https://pod.link/1602572955/episode/00564b1774ebe0e4225a630825ed3deeClaude 4 https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-4 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Longtime Rust contributor Steve Klabnik talks with Richard about the broken state of AI discourse, from excessive hype to excessive hate, and reasonable alternatives we could pursue instead.Steve's blog post: "I am disappointed in the AI discourse" - https://steveklabnik.com/writing/i-am-disappointed-in-the-ai-discourse/Deep dive into why Rust's compile times are slow: https://www.pingcap.com/blog/rust-compilation-model-calamity/Y Combinator partners on "100x productivity" claims: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IACHfKmZMr8&t=155s Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Elixir creator José Valim goes into a very deep dive on language design with Richard, centered around some upcoming major design changes to the Roc programming language.- https://elixir-lang.org- https://roc-lang.org- Unison's algebraic effects: https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/fundamentals/abilities/- Koka's algebraic effects: https://koka-lang.github.io/koka/doc/book.html#why-effects- OCaml's algebraic effects: https://ocaml.org/manual/5.3/effects.html Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Monica McGuigan, a Scala programmer at JP Morgan, talks with Richard about her experiences learning Roc with a Scala background. They get into topics like how language design affects beginners and experts, what parts of functional programming are easier and harder to learn than others, and how language designers inform their design decisions.Support Software Unscripted on Patreon: https://patreon.com/SoftwareUnscriptedMonica's chapter on JSON decoders: https://github.com/roc-lang/book-of-examples/pull/68Grapheme clusters: https://unicode.org/glossary/#extended_grapheme_clusterRoc's string operations: https://www.roc-lang.org/builtins/StrTalk: The Functional Purity Inference Plan: https://youtu.be/42TUAKhzlRI?si=TwxYoqMgh0UXQLfn Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mike Bryzek has been a technical cofounder of two very successful companies using some very unorthodox technical strategies that have worked out very well for him and his teams! These include testing in production, spending the first few months of a brand-new company's life investing in automation and tooling before shipping a product, and microservices - but not done in the way I've usually heard them described.Support Software Unscripted on Patreon: https://patreon.com/SoftwareUnscripted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with Andrew Lisowski, a Senior Engineer at Descript - which makes audio and video editing software that has been used to edit this very podcast! They talk about some of the surprising challenges of dealing with video editing compared to audio alone, the economics of niche podcasts and programming conferences, and the evolution of Web browsers!Support Software Unscripted on Patreon: https://patreon.com/SoftwareUnscriptedDescript: https://www.descript.comAndrew Lisowski: https://www.hipstersmoothie.comdevtools.fm episode that was on HN frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41301639Zencastr: https://zencastr.com/?via=richard-feldmanForced Aligners: https://github.com/MahmoudAshraf97/ctc-forced-alignerGentle Aligner: https://github.com/lowerquality/gentle Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with Peter Saxton, creator of the EYG programming language, about the problems Peter aims to solve with EYG, and some of the unique design decisions he's made with it. A type-safe eval() operation even comes up in the discussion!Support Software Unscripted on Patreon: https://patreon.com/SoftwareUnscriptedEYG: https://eyg.runUnison: https://unison-lang.orgRoc: https://roc-lang.org Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with Will Sentance, the teacher of the Hard Parts series and the founder and CEO of CodeSmith, which is a Software Engineering and AI immersive education program. They talk about how AI is intersecting with modern programming education, what's considered "fundamentals" these days, and how Will thinks about teaching object-oriented and functional programming.Support Software Unscripted on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/SoftwareUnscriptedJavaScript: The Hard Parts: https://frontendmasters.com/courses/javascript-hard-parts-v2/AI for Software Engineers: https://frontendmasters.com/workshops/engineering-and-ai/CodeSmith: https://www.codesmith.io/Richard's courses: https://frontendmasters.com/teachers/richard-feldman/#courses Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with Kyle Boddy about the biomechanical and data analysis software Kyle wrote—and continues to write—as the founder and CTO of Driveline Baseball, a data-driven player development company that has landed numerous players in Major League Baseball, including multiple Most Valuable Players and 2024's number one draft pick. They talk about Kyle's background in PHP and the C++ he wrote to coordinate budget high-speed cameras back when Driveline was a one-programmer garage shop, up through today where large language models have become an integral part of the development team's daily work.Driveline Baseball: https://www.drivelinebaseball.com/Washington Post article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/10/op-moneyballai/Documentary about Driveline: https://youtu.be/K5Dnshu7atUPhind AI: https://www.phind.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For the 100th episode of Software Unscripted, Richard talks with Chris Lattner, creator of Swift, the Clang C++ compiler, LLVM, and now the Mojo programming language, about Mojo, Roc, API design, compiler optimizations, and language design!"Swift for C++ Practitioners" by Doug Gregor - https://www.douggregor.net/posts/swift-for-cxx-practitioners-value-types/Mojo - https://www.modular.com/mojoModular Computing - https://www.modular.comRoc - https://roc-lang.orgLLVM - https://llvm.orgClang - https://clang.llvm.orgSwift - https://www.swift.orgCUDA - https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-zoneSIMD - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_instructionmultipledatacmov instruction - https://github.com/marcin-osowski/cmov Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with Eli Dowling about his contributions to the Roc programming language, as well as the intersection of language design and editor tooling, parsers that recover from errors, tree-sitter, going beyond the language server protocol, and the downsides of macros.Perceus paper - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2020/11/perceus-tr-v1.pdfThe Koka Programming Language - https://koka-lang.github.io"The Quicksort Talk" (Outperforming Imperative with Pure Functional Languages) - https://youtu.be/vzfy4EKwG_YTree-Sitter - https://tree-sitter.github.ioNeovim Editor - https://neovim.ioHelix Editor - https://helix-editor.comZed Editor - https://zed.devLanguage Server Protocol (LSP) - https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocolHygienic Macros - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygienic_macroRust Macros - https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch19-06-macros.html Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with Kelly Shortridge about the CrowdStrike Incident that caused many computers worldwide to get stuck in a boot loop on July 19, 2024.A video version of this episode is available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzjaZssBEiI or ad-free to our wonderful Patreon supporters! https://www.patreon.com/posts/109888395The incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike_incidentKelly Shortridge: https://www.kellyshortridge.comKelly's book: https://securitychaoseng.comHillel Wayne's interviews with traditional engineers who have also been software engineers: https://www.hillelwayne.com/talks/crossover-projectGell-Mann amnesia effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with distributed systems scientist Jonathen Magen about functional programming in distributed systems, including languages like Gleam, Elixir, Ballerina, and Jolie. They also talk about type inference, big data, and a few other topics.Jonathan Magen: https://yonkeltron.com or https://jawns.club/@yonkeltronProgramming languages mentioned:https://ballerina.iohttps://www.jolie-lang.orghttps://gleam.runhttps://elixir-lang.orgRichard's talk: Why Static Typing Came Back - https://youtu.be/Tml94je2edk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with Tom Ballinger about undo and redo in the context of REPLs and running effects, stateful systems in general, hot code loading, and database query planning. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with Juan Vuletich, creator of Cuis Smalltalk, about the past, present and future of Smalltalk - including quite a bit of interesting history and programming philosophy! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with Wolfgang Schuster about his experiences first as a professional game developer, and then later as a professional Web developer. Theytalk about the differences in programming practices he's seen between the two, including things like automated testing, dependency management, and releases. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with Brendan Hansknecht, an AI compiler engineer at Modular, about various testing techniques, including fuzzing, property-based tests, database tests, tests involving network requests, and more! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with Ian Jeffries about his experiences as a Haskeller exploring modern Smalltalk (arguably the original object-oriented programming language), including both the historical context of where Smalltalk came from as well as what it's like using it in a modern context. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks to Michael Newton, a programmer working as a consultant and trainer who has used several different functional programming languages in professional settings. They talk about the differences Michael has found between using F sharp, Haskell, and Elm, and especially how those differences apply in the context of professional production programming. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with Nathan Sobo, founder of Zed Industries (which creates the high-performance Zed code editor) about his time as an early developer on the Atom code editor, including how that project led to Electron. They then discuss how the Zed team has created GPUI, which uses native operating system APIs for events and goes straight to the graphics card for rendering. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with Lucas Rosa, a compiler engineer working on the Aiken programming language for smart contracts, about tradeoffs in language and compiler design, property-based testing, syntax and familiarity, and compile-time evaluation of constants. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with Louis Pilfold, creator of the Gleam programming language, about the language's 1.0 release, as well as other topics like backwards compatibility, hot-swapping code in production, and implementing a typed version of Erlang's famous OTP system, which had also been famously considered to be un-typeable. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks to Thorsten Ball, a programmer at Zed Industries and author of two books on compilers. They start out talking about the differences between compilers and interpreters, what the trickiest parts are of teaching compilers, and then end up talking about the unnecessary complexity that has taken over modern Web Development. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with Rust Analyzer creator Alex Kladov (aka matklad) about compilers, including ways they can do incremental compilation, memory management strategies, modules and boundaries, and even monomorphization! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with programming teacher Greg Wilson about different types of beginner programmers and how they learn most effectively, what counterintuitive aspects of programming languages they tend to find more or less difficult to learn, and about the surprising relationship between software architecture and industrial design. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with RAD Game Tools Debugger programmer Ryan Fleury, about memory management in debugging, caching, operator overloading, and pure functional programming in...C?! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with Ayaz Hafiz, a contributor to the Roc programming language, about a very specific topic in the Roc compiler, namely lambda set defunctionalization (including explaining what that term actually means). They then zoom out to talk about why more languages don't try to implement techniques like this in general. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with Glauber Costa about how to implement databases that can do millions of reads per second, how hardware changes have affected the tradeoffs around relational and NoSQL databsaes, and what people mean by Big Data. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with HTMX creator Carson Gross about some of the ways in which modern web development has arguably regressed over the past 15 or so years, as well as Hypertext, Hypermedia, HyperCard, HyperView, HyperScript, and even some other topics that don't have hyper in the name. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Richard talks with Chris Nuernberger about his experiences making code run faster in the context of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and the similarities and differences between that and trying to make C++ code faster...among several other topics! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with Casey Muratori, a game engine programmer who's known for creating the term Immediate Mode GUIs, for his Twitch series Handmade Hero, and most recently for his excellent Performance Aware Programming course. They talk about performance and the programming culture around it, how memory safety relates to progarm architecture, what Web development can learn from game development, and even some concrete improvements that could be made to, you guessed it...CSS! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Richard talks with Nikita Prokopov, an open-source Clojure developer and creator of the Fira Code typeface, about some of the reasons he'd felt a sense of disenchantment with the direction of software in the past, and strategies he's developed for improving things in the future. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with Brian Carroll about his experience using WebAssembly in practice - including some of the benefits and challenges of using WebAssembly in practice, why WebAssembly adoption might not be as high as it could be today, and speculation about what the future might hold for it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with Matt Godbolt, author of the godbolt.org Compiler Explorer, about how certain aspects of the Compiler Explorer work, as well as "disassembling" language designs themselves - talking about reference counting optimizations, destructors and unwinding, and even defending the infamous design decision of NaN != NaN. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Richard talks with Predrag Gruevski, author of the cargo-semver-checks tool for detecting accidental semantic versioning mistakes in Rust packages, as well as Trustfall, which is an incredibly flexible query engine. They talk about why semantic versioning is so especially tricky to get right in Rust, tradeoffs in different package managers' approaches to semver in general, and how his work on cargo-semver-checks motivated him to create a tool for querying data in just about any format. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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