Become Unsloppable.
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Amin Mesbah
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Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs
Ben VisnessCasey’s lecture on API design is truly evergreen. The best I’ve ever seen by a mile.
The more programming experience I get, the more meaningful this talk becomes. It so sharply clarifies why bad APIs are bad and great APIs are great.
Designing and Evaluating Reusable Components - 2004
@michaellabbe @floooh A disadvantage of adding a null-terminator to Pascal-style (length+pointer) strings is that you lose the ability to make sub-strings without having to copy any of the parent string's memory.
@bvisness this looks great! So much more readable than something like graphviz. I would love to read a blog post about your experience making it.
@pythno Including the question and answer here since youtube makes it so hard to find specific comments.
In this case, the talk is about the history of what we today call OOP, and specifically the now-popular technique of creating compile-time hierarchies of classes that mirror a domain model in order to achieve encapsulation, polymorphism, and code reuse. This is contrasted with another, less well known approach, Entity Component Systems. I was surprised at how far back these ideas go.
There was an excellent programming conference last weekend, and the first talk was this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo84LFzx5nI
It's one of my favorite categories of thing: a deep dive into the history of how things got to be the way they are. So much of modern culture is ahistorical, and IME our field is particularly bad in this respect. It is worthwhile to learn about how theories and techniques developed over time, and to be conscious of the historical context in which we work.
Casey Muratori – The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake – BSC 2025
@michaellabbe I think of this as the John Carmack approach to productivity: https://web.archive.org/web/20220911175639/http://bookofhook.blogspot.com/2013/03/smart-guy-productivity-pitfalls.html?_=1363670119317
> I remember Carmack talking about productivity measurement. While working he would play a CD, and if he was not being productive, he'd pause the CD player.
> He'd then measure his output for the day by how many times he played the CD (or something like that -- maybe it was how far he got down into his CD stack).