Computing Machinery and Intelligence by Alan Turing (feat. Felienne Hermans)

You know Alan Turing, right? And the Turing test? Have you actually read the paper that introduced it, Computing Machinery and Intelligence? No?! You… you are not prepared. With very special guest:Felienne Hermans Notes $ Patreon Mystery AI Hype Theatre 3000 podcast, from Emily M. Bender an…

A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design by Felienne Hermans

In the academic field of programming language research, there are a few prestigious conferences that you must present at to advance in your career. These conferences are rather selective about which presentations they'll accept. If your research work involves proving formal properties about a progr…

Is the Whole Universe a Computer™?

"Is the whole universe a computer?", ask Jack Copeland, Mark Sprevak, and Oron Shagrir in chapter 41 of the book The Turing Guide. They split this question in two, first asking whether the universe itself is a computer, then whether the universe could even be computed. These are lofty, unanswerable…

Moving Beyond Syntax: Lessons from 20 Years of Blocks Programming in AgentSheets by Alexander Repenning

Alexander Repenning created AgentSheets, an environment to help kids develop computational thinking skills. It wrapped an unusual computational model with an even more unusual user interface. The result was divisive. It inspired so many other projects, whilst being rejected at every turn and failin…

Pygmalion by David C. Smith

If you're anything like Ivan (oof, sorry), you've heard of Pygmalion but never caught more than the gist. Some sort of project from the early 70s, similar to Sketchpad or Smalltalk or something, yet another promising prototype from the early history of our field that failed to take the world by sto…

Elephant in the Room

Inventing on Principle Stop Drawing Dead Fish The Future of Programming Yes, all three of them in one episode. Phew! Links $ patreon.com/futureofcoding — Lu and Jimmy recorded an episode about Hest without telling me, and by total coincidence released it on my birthday. Those jerks… make me so h…

Beyond Efficiency by Dave Ackley

Dave Ackley's paper Beyond Efficiency is three pages long. With just these three pages, he mounts a compelling argument against the conventional way we engineer software. Instead of inflexibly insisting upon correctness, maybe allow a lil slop? Instead of chasing peak performance with cache and cle…

Myths & Mythconceptions by Mary Shaw

In the spirit of clearly communicating what you're signing up for, this podcast episode is nearly three hours long, and among other things it contains a discussion of a paper by author Mary Shaw titled Myths & Mythconceptions which takes as an organizing principle a collection of myths that are wid…

Propositions as Types by Philip Wadler

The subject of this episode's paper — Propositions as Types by Philip Wadler — is one of those grand ideas that makes you want to go stargazing. To stare out into space and just disassociate from your body and become one with the heavens. Everything — life, space, time, existence — all of it is a j…

Considered Harmful

Go To Statement Considered Harmful is a solid classic entry in the X Considered Harmful metafiction genre, authored by renowned computer scientist and idiosyncratic grump, Edsger Wybe Dijkstra. Surprisingly (given the impact it's had) this is a minuscule speck of a paper, lasting only 1-ish pages, …