Episode 8: Russ Olsen
Recorded
Published
My guest for this episode is Russ Olsen. We talk a lot about programming languages — his career spans Fortran to Clojure — and his views on how to teach a programming language.
Russ is the author of several books, including Design Patterns in Ruby and Eloquent Ruby. His latest book is Getting Clojure, an introduction to Clojure that focuses on the ideas behind the language.
Russ is also a prolific conference speaker, best known for his talk To the Moon, about the Apollo 11 moon landing.
Also discussed in this episode:
- Metacircular Interpreter (Wikipedia)
- Getting Clojure book
- Cognitect
- Kinematics (Wikipedia)
- The DOE-2 Building Energy Analysis Program (PDF, 1984)
- Computer-Aided Design (CAD)
- Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
- Relevance
- Stu Halloway (Twitter)
- Justin Gehtland (Twitter)
- Technology As If People Mattered (Russ Olsen's Blog)
- Design Patterns in Ruby (Amazon)
- Eloquent Ruby (Amazon)
- To the Moon (YouTube)
- Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered
- String and ArrayList (Javadoc)
- Fortan, Pascal, C, Python, C++, Java, Ruby, and Clojure programming languages
- The Borg (Star Trek Memory Alpha)
- Persistent data structures (Wikipedia)
- S-expressions, Lisp-like syntax (Wikipedia)
- First-class functions (LispCast)
- Anonymous function, lambda (Wikipedia)
- Closure (Wikipedia)
- Getting Clojure (Pragmatic)
- The Java Virtual Machine, JVM (JavaWorld)
- JavaScript (MDN Web Docs)
- ClojureScript
- Common Lisp
- Practical Clojure (Apress) by me and Luke VanderHart
- Clojure Atoms and Refs
- Attractive nuisance (Wikipedia)
- Software transactional memory (Wikipedia)
- Inheritance in Object-Oriented Programming (Wikipedia)
- C++ templates (Wikipedia)
- Indiana Jones (Wikipedia)
- Simple Made Easy talk by Rich Hickey (InfoQ)
- Vectors in Clojure
- Arrays in other programming languages (Wikipedia)
- “Big ball of mud” in relation to Lisp (Wikipedia)
- @russolsen (Twitter)
- The Pragmatic Bookshelf
The theme music is Mandelbrot Set from the album Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow by Jonathan Coulton, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 License, edited and shortened.