Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs - Episode 156: The Last Strange Loop with Richard Feldman

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

In this episode, Conor and Bryce interview Richard Feldman, creator of the Roc programming language, about the last edition of the Strange Loop conference, virtual vs in-person events and more.Link to Episode 156 on WebsiteDiscuss this episode, leave a comment, or ask a question (on GitHub)TwitterADSP: The PodcastConor HoekstraBryce Adelstein LelbachAbout the Guest:Richard Feldman is the creator of the Roc programming language, the host of the Software Unscripted podcast, and the author of Elm in Action from Manning Publications. He teaches online courses on Frontend Masters: Introduction to Rust, Introduction to Elm, and Advanced Elm. Outside of programming, he’s a fan of strategy games, heavy metal, powerlifting, and puns!Show NotesDate Recorded: 2023-11-13Date Released: 2023-11-17Software Unscripted PodcastWhy Isn’t Functional Programming the Norm? – Richard FeldmanStrange Loop Conference“The Economics of Programming Languages” by Evan Czaplicki (Strange Loop 2023)“Software & The Game of Go” by David Nolen (Strange Loop 2023)“A Long Strange Loop” by Alex Miller (Strange Loop 2023)Intro Song InfoMiss You by Sarah Jansen https://soundcloud.com/sarahjansenmusicCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/l-miss-youMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/iYYxnasvfx8

How do you pronounce that name right there? Chaplitsky. One more time. Chaplitsky. Okay. That is the answer. Okay. Thank you, Ramona.

Well, it's official. Thank you, dear. I'll let Evan know he needs to update it to that. Welcome to ADSP, the podcast, episode 156, recorded on November 13th, 2023. My name is Connor, and today with my co-host Bryce, we interview Richard Feldman, creator of the brand new Rock Programming Language and host of the Software Unscripted podcast. In today's episode, we chat with him about the last edition of the Strange Loop Conference, virtual versus in-person conferences, and more. Richard, can I ask, have you been, like, you seem to be in a closet is, is everything okay? Are you?

Yes. This is, this is my recording studio. Doesn't everybody's look like this? I used to record from a closet. So, you know? Yeah.

Oh, so what happened was, uh, I was on a podcast once and, uh, the room I'm normally in has like an air conditioner unit next to it. And it turned on and someone was like, what is that horrible loud noise? And I was like,

Oh, sorry. And they're like, well, do you have any place you could go that's like just you know small space nothing and this is like the the place they're like oh the audio quality is great in here you should you should always record from here so i was like ah cool so now i always record from here makes sense bryce doesn't know much about audio quality so no but i i do know that air conditioner bad from the one time that i recorded half of a talk um and not like the first half of the last half like you know some slides with the ac on some slides with the ac off and then later realized my mistake and had

to go through and re-record all of the AC slides. All right. Well, as per usual, we've dove. I don't know if that's the right tense of that word, but we're going to stick with it. So I will give a brief introduction. We've mentioned him several times on the podcast before. We did. On the context of typically bringing up Rock, which is obviously Richard's. For those that are in the know uh richards

programming language uh but actually do you still work for no red ink uh not as of uh april so now i work at vendor v-e-n-d-r okay i think i recall that because i recall in a talk you mentioned that you were i think switching companies and part of that was basically you were going to be working if not full-time on rock you were going to be working, if not full-time on Rock, you were going to be spending a large percentage of your time working on Rock there. Yes. So works at Vendor now.

There was a yes there that I may or may not have just cut off. But, I mean, before working at Vendor, you worked at NoRedInk, which is probably because of the sort of evangelism that you do, giving talks about functional programming, one of the most well-known Elm shops. And you have a podcast now that's been going on for, I think, 60 or 70 episodes, Software Unscripted. And you've given, as I just mentioned, a bunch of very highly regarded and highly viewed talks. My personal favorite, I think because we were chatting about this a week ago, my favorite is why functional programming isn't the norm. And it's got about like a million and a half views on YouTube.

So link will be in the show notes if you want to go and check that out. Yeah, I mean, lots of stuff we can talk about today. I think we're going to spend a little bit of time chatting about the last edition of Strangeloop because I happen to know that you were at that installation. And I think you've been at a number of those installations. Almost all of them. Almost all of them.

Almost all of them. Yeah. Well, let's just, and don't worry, listener, we will get to Rock. That's ROC, cutting edge, nascent programming language. We love programming languages on this podcast. We do. And we even love more the, you know, the nascent in there, you know, adolescence. I don't know if you would say it's in its adolescence, but Carbon, Hilo, we love all the languages that aren't even languages yet. I

think, I think Rock is a lot further, but before we get to Rock, if you want to add anything to that off the cuff introduction, and then maybe we can chat a bit about all the times you've been to Strange Loop and how the last one was, I'll throw it over to you and we can go from there. Yeah, well, thanks. That was a, that was a lovely introduction. Yeah, we can talk about Strange Loop. So I used to live in St. Louis when the first Strange Loop happened. So I've been to almost all of them. I think I went to 10 of them out of the 12 that there were. I missed two. The first one I missed because I just moved out of St. Louis and it seemed silly to fly back after I just left. And the second one, my son was going to be born right around there. So that was not going to work. Wife wouldn't let you,

wife, wife wouldn't let you go. Oh, that wasn't even a conversation. I wasn't like, Hey, do you think it'd be all right? Like, no, it's just like, that's not, I mean, cause it was like, you know, the due date was around then. So, you know, it might've worked out, but it might've extremely not worked out. So I didn't feel like rolling the dice on that one having a conversation with rich hickey oh my wife just uh hang on i gotta i gotta go because i am a dad now understandable um yeah strange loops really great i'm gonna miss it uh i don't know what what do you want to chat about strange loop wise i mean so i was thinking about going to the last one it was just at the tail so it is you know middle of november right now this took place i think it was the

second last week or maybe the last week of september so just like roughly two months ago and i think it was because i had a wedding at the beginning of the month and i was going to be on the other side of the world for a couple weeks weeks that I decided not to go, but I've just seen so many good talks over the years. I mean, I think back in the day, Strangeloop used to have a track called the Emerging Programming Languages track, which I don't think they had, you know, the last couple of years, but like you can go and find some talks of like languages that are actually kind of, you know, I wouldn't say mainstream, but like pretty popular and have like big user bases that back then were a lot smaller. So

anyways, I'm just curious, like, how was how was, you know, this last version? I've seen a bunch of the talks. We'll link some of my favorites. I mean, Evan, I can never pronounce his last name. It's so he pronounces it Chaplicky. I okay, I have a funny story about that, though. So the first time I met Evan so Evan created Elm and so I was living in San Francisco so was he I had just started trying out this language based on a blog post and I really really liked it and I found out that he also lived in

San Francisco and I was like oh let me just like DM him on Twitter and just see if like hey you know I'd love to just like grab lunch with you and I really like your language so I met him in person I asked him that same question I was like so how are you supposed to pronounce your last name and he's like i'm not sure what of all the answers i could have gotten i was not expecting that one and so he said well apparently like if you're polish which is where the name comes from they would say like

and he just recently discovered this and he's like but i always grew up my parents always said chaplicky so i'm not sure like what's correct like he's like, but I always grew up, my parents always said Chaplicky. So I'm not sure, like, what's correct? Like, what's more correct? But after some, you know, he's like, I'm just going to stick with it. How is this name spelled? C-Z-A-P-L-I-C. C-Z-A-P-L-I-C. C-Z-A-P-L-I-C.

And there's an I at the end there.-A-P-I-C. There's an I at the end there. Oh, here's what Bryce is doing. His girlfriend is Polish. Wait a minute. It's C-Z-A-P-I-C-I. Let me put it in the chat. Just so, okay. Put it in the chat.

This is a first. This is a first. I'm not sure if Ramona has actually, her voice has ever been on the podcast. A lot of times Bryce will refer to Ramona, but I think Evan Chaplicki. So that's from what Evan has said, but now we're going to get. Sweetie, we need your skills. How do you pronounce that name right there? Chaplicki. One more there? Chaplitsky. One more time.

Chaplitsky. Okay. That is the answer. Thank you, Ramona. Well, it's official. Thank you, dear. I'll let Evan know he needs to update it to that. Well, I mean, you did that his he discovered that the polish pronunciation

it sounds very similar to what that was right there so um yeah and i mean technically i think that's very common though is that the anglo you know pronunciation of a lot of last names is not you know accurate to whatever you know it actually like i think technically my last name we pronounce it hoekstra but in Dutch, it's much different. I'm not even going to attempt to try and say it. So, you know, whenever someone said, like, I think my principal, he called me Hoekstra. And I was like, well, I know that's wrong, but like, I'm also probably saying it wrong. So it's like, it's not a big deal.

Right. I think it's a very American thing to insist that other people mispronounce things the way we mispronounce them. It's like, this is not the official pronunciation, but you know what? Now you need to pronounce it our way. Yes. That is a very, very,

uh, a Western kind of thing. Anyways, lots of great talks. One was given by Evan and I don't think he had given one in a while. So, I mean, I saw some comments on it that said,

Oh, you know, finally Evan has come out of the woodworks and another great talk from him because he's given a lot of good ones in the past. Anyways, just like overall thoughts. How was the last one? Any, you know finally evan has come out of the woodworks and another great talk from him because he's given a lot of good ones in the past anyways just like overall thoughts how was the last one any you know of your talks that you or talks that you saw that you thought were great or you know and and just sort of you know i because i listened to a ton of podcasts and i don't think any of them really did like a strange loop recap so we don't need to do like a full-blown recap but i was expecting some of the functional podcasts to like mention that oh it was the last one and here's

some good talks you should go watch so that's that's my attempt here uh to get you know a review from someone was there well so i mean functional wise i mean that the two main presenters at least that i remember offhand that gave uh talks who were sort of in the functional community would be evan of course and then also david nolan, who's been like the lead for closure script for a long time. But his talk, neither their talks were about functional programming. I mean, Evans was about the like funding models for open source programming languages. And David's was about go. So like, sorry, not the language. And there may have been some others that i'm not remembering but i guess the reason that those stuck out at me is um kind of my plan because

it was the last strange loop was i mainly just wanted to see a lot of people that i'm i know i'm not going to get to see in person you know uh for maybe a long time because we won't have strange loop every year which is like normally what I would catch up with them. So I hallway tracked very hard at that conference. And that wasn't hard to do because, I mean, basically, actually even before I got to the venue, like when I was in the hotel lobby about to walk over, I just started recognizing people and like say, oh, hey, hey, hey,

and just like talking to people and catching up. And like we walked over and they ran into more people and started catching up with them. And it was pretty much nonstop, like talking to people and catching up and, you know, seeing what people are up to for most of the first day. Uh, and then I, I guess I went to a couple of talks. Um, but I mean, for me, that was the sort of the main experience of the conference. So I guess if you're looking for, um, there was a really cool art installation, uh, also by a friend of mine, uh, or he, he made it with one other person, uh, Charles Comstock, shout out to Charles.

Uh, he made, um, it's like the strange loop infinity logo. And he basically set it up so that it had all of these leds inside that you could programmatically control they had like a little laptop and also a little midi keyboard so you could like play things and see in real time that like the leds change and try putting in little algorithms and make it animate so that um you can make like color patterns or uh or try to get like some design to to go around the loops it's really cool but overall i mean, I mean, uh, I, I hate to disappoint, but I, you know, if I was going to talk about a talk that really blew my mind, it was, um, I mean, Evan's talk was my favorite one, but I didn't watch very many of the talks because I was so

busy talking to people. I mean, that checks out. There's, there's many conferences that I've been to where there's, you know, I have a talk schedule and then you find yourself talking to insert person that you do not live in the same city with, and you are not going to have the opportunity to continue whatever conversation that you're having. And so, I mean, half, half the times you end up just being like, do you want to go grab a bite to eat somewhere? And then you're, you know, 50 minute hallway conversation turns into a three hour, you know, lunch or dinner, which then extends into like other people joining you i mean bryce bryce and i were at a conference in the uk in june and that's what happened like half the time where like literally i was just like well that's the thing is you know the talks are going to be

online right so if you are worried of missing something like it's not actually going to be the talk it's going to be for the people not the talk yeah um yeah well there's definitely certain reasons that i'll go to a talk like one is if i if i'm friends with the speaker i'll always go just to sort of you know show support um yeah but also um if i want to ask the speaker a question um i'll go like if i or i maybe anticipate that i might want to ask a question based on you know the the content of the talk um then i'll go because of course you can't do that online it's like too late but uh like that is if you're watching it later and then maybe if i'm thinking that this is going to be a a talk that a lot of people are going to be

talking about at the conference then i want to go just kind of have the context so you know that's there's an element of watching a talk that's kind of reminds me of watching a movie in a movie theater with a group of friends which is that partly it's to go and get the experience of seeing it in person you know in the theater which is kind of different than watching it at home and i would say it's even more true of seeing like a you know concert in person or seeing a talk in person um but even beyond that it's like you walk out of the theater together and you're all talking about what you just saw together at the same time and there's some elements of that too for that's like another reason that i would potentially watch a talk yeah but other than that like i'm definitely

of the same mind like the the thing that's irreplaceable is the person-to-person face-to-face contact and i think that's kind of why for me i've tried to do some online conferences but i just really have not gotten into them like in person is really kind of uh the main selling point to be of a conference is that seeing people in person and talking to them and the conversations that happen seem to be just on a totally different level in terms of yeah quality yeah i i i'm pretty sure bryce and i have like conflicted feelings because i i watched alex miller's talk who for those that are not once again in the know alex is the individual that has been organizing strange loop since the beginning and it's his basically uh baby and he gave a talk on kind of the reasons on why he was ending it and one like

there was many uh but one of them was like the um carbon footprint of like there's obviously a huge cost on the environment when you're getting a bunch of people that live around the globe to fly in somewhere and i also like you know whenever i can like if if i have the ability to not fly somewhere uh i will i will not fly uh but a lot of times if you're going to you know the uk or you're going somewhere you're not you know the the flying is the only option and i like i wish that virtual conferences know, even if they have like 50% of that, like the, like you said, like the level of conversation that you have, it's just on an entirely, and it's, I don't even think it's just the conversation. It is the chance encounters and like the ability to walk up to like, you know, the Pac-Man

circles and join conversations or, and the, you know, if, whether it's out having dinner or there's some social afterwards, whether, you know, there's drinks involved. Like I was at a conference back in October, um, at this, uh, like conference retreat center at Syracuse university in the middle of nowhere in the Adirondacks. And you had to drive like, you know, three hours from the closest city to get there. And it was just like unbelievable. The like, cause you're basically, it's a single track conference over two or three days and everyone's together eating breakfast, lunch and dinner because of the whole thing's catered because you're in the middle of nowhere.

And just like the conversation that you end up happening, it's just like, I have not gotten anywhere close in like a virtual conference or in like a zoom teams meeting. And it's like this or juxtaposition or dichotomy of like on one hand i wish we could you know harm the environment less by flying around but on at the same time like i've never been to a virtual conference where like those kinds of chance encounters and experiences have even come close to like being replicated and i don't have a solution i don't know what to do i just uh i completely agree with you that like those kinds of conversations that like and it's not even just like a 15 minute thing. It's like, it happens over the conference. You'll

start chatting about something on Monday and then on Wednesday you'll have some idea and then you'll circle back to it. And anyways, I'm not sure if you have grand thoughts or solutions, if there's going to be a rock conference in the future. I mean, Oh, you got to think about what you're going to call that. It sounds like you're talking about Rock and Hall of Fame or Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I mean, I certainly hope that there will be a rock conference in the future,

but I also, I don't think I would be the one to organize it. That seems like, A, something that's, it's better if it's community organized anyway. But B, I don't think I would do well as a conference organizer. I'll give a talk. It's a thanklessless a thankless profession

and and really hard and yeah that has a requires a skill set that uh i don't think overlaps with my skill set a whole lot yeah i mean i i would say i'm torn on the the in-person versus remote because um uh certain there have been certain groups that I've worked with who were very resistant to remote work during the pandemic. The C++ Committee, of course, being one of them, but there are a few others. And boy, would I love to just be able to declare like, that's nonsense. Like we can, we can, you know, we can, we can do the same work, uh, virtually that we can do in person. Um, but, uh, I think that's probably not true. Um, or at the very least you can do the work part,

um, remotely, but you can't do the, um, the social and political part of the job remotely. And a reality that I think very few people recognize and accept in tech is that every every job every every career every profession um there are inner like interpersonal interactions matter um community matters and there's going to be politics and that's going to matter too yeah and so so because of all those aspects the um the the obvious social benefit of being face-to-face with people, I think is important. But I mean, I think in today's age, that means really that if we're meeting face-to-face, probably one of the primary reasons to meet face-to-face is to build those connections, to socialize, for people to get to know each other, to collaborate, not necessarily to

actually do work. There are certain types of work that I think work better in a synchronous face-to-face environment, but there's other things that just are naturally a better fit for something asynchronous like if you just need need one person's like opinion or review of something um like send an email and let them reply to that email yeah i agree um i'm lost are you sounds like you're half advocating for committee meetings and i thought we were both like we they just had the committee meeting in hawaii seems necessary yeah yeah i'm i'm the bad i'm the bad guy who wrote who like like actually protested us having a meeting in hawaii i mean you're the bad guy for the folks that want to keep going to

hawaii but you're the good guy if you think it should be unnecessary to convene in Hawaii in order to evolve the language and library. I'll actually, if I can find it. I'm guessing Hawaii wasn't the midpoint of everyone's location. No. Yeah. And it's just like, while you're looking for that, Bryce, it seems comical that like all the other languages, you know, Rock, Swift, Rust, etc. They're doing GitHub, asynchronous, you know, they seem to be doing just fine. And C++ is struggling, I'd say. And then they go to Hawaii.

And then out of Hawaii, there's all these reports. Wow, we're making progress on reflection. We're making progress on contracts. And it's like, oh, that's what was missing. A Hawaii meeting. You just, people need to be motivated. And it's just like of all the places hawaii like that's inconvenient for like americans to get to let alone like people around the world like what and it just i don't want to say that there's you know whatever some evil

conspiracy or whatever but it just seems like of all the places that you could convene to do committee work even if you're trying to rotate it from like Europe to America, et cetera, like Hawaii doesn't make the short list of places that's like good for the environment, easy for people to get to, you know, time zone makes sense for people that want to tune in virtually for some sort of meeting. But, you know, hey, you know, I haven't been to Hawaii. So maybe if I had been there, then I'd feel differently. And I'd be like, you know what? It's that, that summer breeze and perfect weather. I'd never, I'd never had such clear thoughts and

mental acuity in my life. I will, I will read the, the email that I sent to the C++ committee. The email reads, NVIDIA believes it is inappropriate to hold professional events like C++ committee meetings and vacation destinations such as Kona, which is why we voted now on the Insights C++ motion to host the 2023 November meeting in Kona. We have the following specific objections to Kona. Number one, meeting in vacation destinations makes it harder for attendees to justify travel to their management and convince them that C++ community meetings are a professional environment where we focus on doing work, not having fun. Number two, it is a remote destination that is difficult and expensive to travel to. Number three, lodging and dining options are expensive and limited in diversity. Number four, it is in an inopportune time zone, UTC minus 10, that is punishing for remote attendees as it is a few time zones away from any major population centers. All good points.

That's my basic objective i mean ultimately what it fundamentally comes down to to me is that um i don't think that there's certain aspects of a tourist destination that i think make it bad fit for a professional um uh event even if it's like socializing um even if the's like socializing. Even if the main purpose of the event is to socialize. I'm thinking places like Las Vegas, Orlando, or Hawaii too. One, it's going to be a lot more expensive because there's a ton of other people that are there for tours.

I mean, Las Vegas might be cheaper. They got a lot of conference centers cheaper. Um, and there are a bunch of conferences that are, that are held there, but, um, but also it's like, you know, you pick a hotel for your, you pick a venue space and in these tourist destinations, those hotels and venue spaces, their primary market is not, you know, people traveling for work. It's people traveling for fun. You know, that Kona committee meeting, for many years, we stayed at this one hotel, the Royal Kona Hotel. And the reason that we switched hotels was that one year, NVIDIA, which at the time had people who chaired two different subgroups, we basically told the committee, hey, this hotel is so bad that we, NVIDIA, will pay to have rooms at another hotel, and we're going to hold our study groups there. And the rest of you can stay at this hotel, but we're leaving. Like, we understand you have a contract and you have to stay at the bad

hotel, but we're not going to be there. And the committee eventually decided to break their contract with the other hotel. And like, what was wrong with the other hotel? Well, one of the meeting rooms that we were given was literally outside with such bad noise pollution from everything around that you had to use like a loudspeaker to be able to be heard. And then at one point, there were two different groups that had to meet next to each other in an outdoor room. And so, you would hear everything that the people next to you would be saying. Then there were like some normal hotel problems like mold in some of the rooms, stuff like that. But then also every time we would be there,

there would be at least one, maybe two weddings. And so you'd have people who spent 10, 12 hours working or socializing, interacting, and want to go to bed at a normal hour. And there would be some crazy, you know crazy wedding party or other thing going on. I would much rather, if we're going to have these sorts of gatherings, I'd much rather have them in places where their market is more professional events or professional retreats.

If you want to have your conference in a nice, beautiful destination, there's a ton of good places for that that I think are less objectionable than Hawaii. I would even argue, Connor and I go to a conference in Aspen every year. I would even argue that Aspen's better. It's not. I haven't been to Aspen. I only went there once back in 2019. I've been back since.

But, you know, even Aspen's a little bit harder to access, but it is near a major airport. It is in a major time zone. It's nice and quiet when we're there. Good professional venues. It's a good place for a retreat when you want to get away from people like the environment where you're going to hold an event i think really does um matter a lot um and uh uh when you hold your event in hawaii that sends a pretty strong signal all right so before we transition uh to chatting about

rock here because we're coming in at the 30 minute mark which is we usually dice these up into 30 minute episodes in 60 seconds or less why is this meeting still happening like you you wrote the committee protested well okay so so i i'm sorry i didn't read you the last sentence of the email that i sent uh we which is that i basically said we recognize that it is impractical to move the 2023 november meeting because contracts have already been signed people have already booked travel etc this objection we made like six months a year before the meeting and then six months before the meeting but uh we we before the meeting. But, uh, we,

we voted no just to express our objection and to discourage future, future meetings in vacation destinations. All right. So basically we'll see in two years, stay tuned. Yeah. The TLDR of, uh,

of NVIDIA's position is that, uh, the C++ committee should be no fun. Um, uh, sorry, like. Sorry, but no fun. I mean, I think your enumeration of points had nothing to do with fun. It had to do with inconvenience cost and appropriate locations for being able to be productive. And I'm sure if you asked all the people that get to go to Hawaii once every two years, they'd say, you know, I'm at my maximum productivity. It's a great place to, you know, relax after a long days of work. But I'm sure,

you know, that's just because people like going, like having a company paid trips to Hawaii is probably what it is. Anyway, so if you do end up having, I mean, I don't think Rock is going to go the way of committee meetings, but if you do, Richard, you know, I'd steer clear of Hawaii. Otherwise, ADS be the podcast will come after you just as hard as the C++ committee. Speaking of which, and oh, yeah, also, too, this is, I think, technically going to be episode 156 that just wrapped, which is our three-year anniversary.

So, I mean, once a year, we usually ask folks, you know, you don't actually have to go give us a rating. I was just on Spotify the other day, and I saw we had a 4.6 out of 5 stars, which, off of 86 ratings, which I think is pretty good, you know? We'd love to be 4.7, though. But also, if you don't like us and you listen, feel free to go whatever, you know, I hate podcasts that say, go leave us five stars. It's like, well, what if, what if you don't think it's a five-star podcast, you know? So you leave whatever you think. And if you don't want to rate,

that's fine too. So thanks for listening. We will do some three-year anniversary special, probably with Sean Parent, because he has some thoughts about our last couple episodes. Be sure to check these show notes either in your podcast app or at ADSPthepodcast.com for links to any of the things that we mentioned in today's episode, as well as a link to a GitHub discussion where you can leave thoughts, comments, and questions. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed and have a great day. Low quality, high quantity. That is the tagline day low quality high quantity that is the tagline of our podcast that's not the tagline our tagline is chaos with sprinkles of information