No-frills discussions between Bruce Eckel and James Ward about programming, what it is, and what it should be.
We chat with Paul Snively (https://x.com/JustDeezGuy) about how Functional Programming has gone mainstream.Resources- Winter Tech Forum - https://www.wintertechforum.com- Paul Snively's LambdaConf Talk on Verse - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBT0j14rn5c- Paul Snively's Blog Post on the Verse Calculus - https://paul-snively.github.io/posts/2022-12-15-verse-calculus.html- Eugenio Moggi, "Notions of Computation and Monads" (1991) - https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Moggi91.pdf- "Implementing Lazy Functional Languages on Stock Hardware: The Spineless Tagless G-machine"** by Simon Peyton Jones - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/1992/04/spineless-tagless-gmachine.pdf- The Verse Calculus Paper - https://simon.peytonjones.org/verse-calculus/- "How to Solve It" by George Pólya - https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691164076/how-to-solve-it- Fidelity Framework - https://github.com/FidelityFramework- Happy Path Programming Episode #37 from Aug 14, 2021 "The Future of Everything with Paul Snively" - https://open.spotify.com/episode/62iyGUUwh5CBkxkDpJmUuoDiscuss this episode: https://discord.gg/XVKD2uPKyF
Bruce & James recap the technology shifts of 2025 and look ahead to what may be ahead in 2026.
Resources:
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At Western State Colorado University in Gunnison on Sept 11, 2025, Bruce Eckel, Bill Venners and Dianne Marsh each give their own 10-minute perspectives on finding fulfillment in the field, especially considering the impact of AI and other recent changes in computing. The remainder of the session answers questions from the student audience.
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Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is "code" but without most of the benefits of being code. Sam Goodwin is reinventing IaC with Alchemy and an upcoming Alchemy Effect project which aims to manage infrastructure dependencies & provisioning in the same way we manage requirements in Effect Oriented Programming.
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Excitement around Python type checking continues to grow and the tools continue to evolve. We chat with Aaron Pollack and Steven Troxler about Pyrefly - a Rust-based Python type checker and IDE extension. We also touch on the adoption and sentiment around types in Python's ecosystem.Resources:
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Carl Meyer works on the ty Python type checker, built in Rust by Astral the creators of Ruff and uv. We chat about type systems, the evolution of static typing in Python, and the focus on performance.
Resources:
Richard Feldman: Roc compiler moving from Rust to Zig
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We chat with Jennifer Reif about integrating LLMs with data using RAG, vectorized data, and Graph databases.
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Rod Johnson, creator of the Spring Framework, has created a JVM-based AI Agent framework called Embabel. We dive in and learn how enterprises can build more reliable Agents using deterministic planning and domain-driven orchestration.
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We chat with Steve Manuel (of dylibso.com and mcp.run) about LLM "plugins" with Wasm & MCP (Model Context Protocol).
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Justin Reock has spent a lot of his career thinking about how to help developers be more productive. In this episode we learn about the methodologies that can help developers spend more time in "flow state" - happily coding the fun stuff. Further reading: Measuring developer productivity with the DX Core 4
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Lize Raes teaches us about AI models, LLMs, Tools, Agents, and MCP.
Article from Anthropic on Agent architectures: Building effective agents
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