PickVidsBest Programming language design Videos
The 193 Programming language design videos here were recommended by different people across different months. Choose by who it is for: 15 introductory, 107 intermediate, 21 for a general viewer, and 50 for someone who wants the harder derivation. Most of them are a talk. What they share is that one speaker finishes a claim, and the examples exist to hold that claim up. Channels you will keep seeing include Strange Loop Conference, ClojureTV, Google TechTalks.
Four Languages from Forty Years Ago - Scott Wlaschin
Scott Wlaschin's NDC Oslo talk on four 1970s languages, SQL, Prolog, ML and Smalltalk.
A Tour of Prolog
Markus Triska tours Prolog's most distinctive features, including its use as a database and query language, rule processing, constraint solving and compile-time rewriting.
Living Computation: Robust-first programming in ULAM
Dave Ackley presents robust-first computing and the ULAM programming language for the Movable Feast Machine, a cellular-automata-like architecture.
Chuck Moore's Fireside Chat 2011
Chuck Moore, creator of Forth, gives his annual Fireside Chat at Forth Day 2011 at Stanford.
Self: The Movie;
A 1995 Sun Microsystems film about the Self programming language, a prototype-based Smalltalk relative, showing its live, graphical programming environment.
2023 LLVM Dev Mtg - Mojo 🔥: A system programming language for heterogenous computing
A 2023 LLVM Developers' Meeting keynote by Abdul Dakkak, Chris Lattner and Jeff Niu introducing Mojo, a Python-family systems language built on MLIR and LLVM for heterogeneous computing.
Computer Science - Brian Kernighan on successful language design
Brian Kernighan gives a talk at the University of Nottingham on how to succeed in language design without really trying.
Why Static Typing Came Back • Richard Feldman • GOTO 2022
Richard Feldman's GOTO Copenhagen 2022 talk on why dynamic languages like Python, Ruby, PHP and JavaScript rose in the 1990s and why each now has a popular static type checker.
Philip Wadler - Propositions as Types (Lambda Days 2016)
Philip Wadler's Lambda Days talk on propositions as types, the link between logic and computation that underlies theorem provers and programming language design.
Dynamic Languages Wizards Series - Panel on Language Design
A 2001 panel with Paul Graham, John Maeda, Jonathan Rees and Guy Steele on programming language design, part of the Dynamic Languages Wizards Series.
"How to Think about Parallel Programming: Not!" - Guy L. Steele Jr. (Strange Loop 2010)
Guy Steele's Strange Loop 2010 talk argues that programmers should not have to think about parallelism, and that languages should support algorithms built on independence and divide-and-conquer.
Edward Kmett - Type Classes vs. the World
Edward Kmett speaks at the Boston Haskell meetup about type classes and the design tradeoffs of global coherence compared with other approaches to implicit instances.
Keynote. Professor Steven G. Johnson | JuliaCon 2019
Steven G.
Guido van Rossum: Python and the Future of Programming | Lex Fridman Podcast #341
A roughly three-hour Lex Fridman podcast conversation with Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python.
"Pixie - A Lightweight Lisp with 'Magical' Powers" by Timothy Baldridge
Timothy Baldridge presents Pixie, a lightweight Lisp built on RPython, at Strange Loop 2015.
Psp collections: views and more by Paul Phillips
Paul Phillips, a major Scala compiler contributor, gives a long talk on Scala collections and views, using it to critique Scala's design and direction.
"Eve" by Chris Granger
Chris Granger presents Eve, a programming environment designed to be approachable for humans, at Strange Loop 2015.
Imba is Underrated: Building a counter in 49 seconds
A five-minute video showing how to build a counter in the Imba web programming language in under a minute, then style it.
The Origins of APL - 1974
A 1974 talk-show-style interview with the original developers of APL, including Iverson, Falkoff and Breed.
"Code is the Easy Part" by Evan Czaplicki
Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, gives an elm-conf 2016 talk on the non-code side of building a language.
"Type-Driven Program Synthesis" by Nadia Polikarpova
Nadia Polikarpova's Strange Loop talk on program synthesis driven by refinement types, as in Synquid.
Jonathan Blow - Jai Demo and Design Explanation (KEYNOTE) - Updated
Jonathan Blow's LambdaConf 2025 keynote demonstrates the Jai programming language and explains its design.
Parallelism, Concurrency, and Asynchrony in Perl 6 / Jonathan Worthington
Jonathan Worthington's YAPC Asia 2015 talk on parallelism, concurrency and asynchrony in Perl 6.
01 The History of Standard ML: Ideas, Principles, Culture
An ICFP 2015 keynote on the history of Standard ML, covering its ideas, principles and culture.