Great Talks
Joe Armstrong & Alan Kay - Joe Armstrong interviews Alan Kay
We Really Don't Know How To Compute!
Gerald Jay Sussman Oct 27, 2011
Gerald Jay Sussman compares our computational skills with the genome, concluding that we are way behind in creating complex systems such as living organisms, and proposing a few areas of improvement.
The Future of Programming
Bret Victor July 30, 2013
Lastly, here's some advice Alan Kay gave me (as I was going through a small personal crisis as a result of reading Jerome Bruner's "Toward a Theory of Instruction"):
I think the trick with knowledge is to "acquire it, and forget all except the perfume" -- because it is noisy and sometimes drowns out one's own "brain voices". The perfume part is important because it will help find the knowledge again to help get to the destinations the inner urges pick.
Programming and Scaling
Alan Kay July 21, 2011
The Power of Abstraction
Barbara Liskov Jan 29, 2013
Presented as a Keynote during OOPSLA'09, 24th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications.
Life Beyond the Illusion of Present by Jonas Boner
Jonas Bonér, inventor of Akka, discusses down some constraints in distributed systems which - more fundamentally than the CAP theorem even - limit the assumptions you can make about the systems you collaborate with over a distance.
Building Brains to Understand the World's Data
Found this while looking for the talk of Jeff Hawkins' that I saw live at Strange Loop. You won't hear the acronym 'Recurrent Neural Networks" in here because his ideas predate that moniker. But indeed he has reasonably modeled a brain in software. And it is - fundamentally a prediction engine that feeds back until its predictions get better. I wish every person who claims to work with human brains (psychologists, team leaders, teachers, etc..) would watch this.
Are we building programs, or could they be building us
Dan Pinker, Daniel Dennet, Susan Blackmore - great thinkers and studiers of memes - software in the most general sense. Much like Michael Pollan did with 'The Botany Of Desire', Susan turns our assumptions inside out by pointing out how useful it is to these ideas, and the silicon in which they reside, that we devote ever greater amounts of our time and energy to building new homes and transmission vectors for them.