I really enjoyed this Strange Loop presentation by Jack Rusher. He covers a whole lot of ground in a humours and compelling talk about the dumb ideas that persist in programming.

People in tech like to think they are on the cutting edge. In fact, we still follow many of the same theories that were invented many years ago. In many cases, we haven’t moved on from the basic structures that were used when people programmed with punch cards. The discussion of why we have eighty columns and the Vim key bindings is a lot of fun. I agree with his opinion that debugging is an important thing to make easy and obvious.

Mr. Rusher is opinionated and passionate about the pros and cons of various languages. He likes Erlang and Clojure and talks about some of the interesting languages and tools that he’s worked on. Very cool stuff and worth a watch if you program.