Show Notes
In this podcast I get down to business with Robert Smith, the creator of Coalton, a language-within-a-language for Common Lisp. We cover a bunch of things, including: LISP through the years REPL-driven development (and why you might not always want a REPL attached!) What makes Common Lisp special How Coalton brings a powerful, Haskell-like type system to Common Lisp Writing efficient code without turning your beautiful Common Lisp code into pulp
Had I given my podcasts titles, this one could be called "Much Ado About Macros"
Episode links: Toward safe, flexible, and efficient software in Common Lisp Debugging Lisp in space A Road to Common Lisp Coalton Hackett stylewarning.com @stylewarning
More from Func Prog Podcast
I sit down with Don Syme, the creator of F#! We chat about language design, the "sweet spot" of type system expressivity, and how A.I. will affect the future of software development.
In this episode I sit down with Adam Tornhill, founder of CodeScene, to talk about technical debt, Clojure, and why it's so hard to write good software. Topics covered From electrical engineering to software psychology Why writing good code is so hard The origin story of CodeScene What technical debt really is, and why traditional metrics like cyclomatic complexity fall short Code health: measuring what makes code hard to understand Visualizing code to align engineering and management The story behind Your Code as a Crime Scene Making the business case for refactoring Lean manufacturing vs. software: the visibility problem Code quality and business impact (10× slower, 15× more defects) AI-friendly code: when LLMs break (and why) How technical debt amplifies AI failure rates AI as an engineering force multiplier (or multiplier of chaos) The future developer: AI team lead? Why Adam chose Clojure for CodeScene Immutability, REPLs, and iterative problem solving Test-driven development as cognitive support Performance myths in dynamic languages Parallelism made simple with immutability The real drawbacks of Clojure Static vs dynamic typing in large codebases Hiring in niche languages: small pool, strong engineers Naming, domain modeling, and long-term code health Links AI-Ready Code: How Code Health Determines AI Performance Code Red: The Business Impact of Code Quality Your Code as a Crime Scene Treat Your Code as a Crime Scene Beating the Averages CodeScene.com AdamTornhill.com
In this episode, I talk to Giacomo Cavalieri, a core Gleam team member. We cover what makes Gleam special and why developers love it, and how it brings modern type safety to the battle-tested Erlang ecosystem. How did Gleam become Stack Overflow's 2nd most admired language in such a short time? Listen to the episode and find out!
In this episode, I sit down with Robert Kreuzer, co-founder and CTO at Channable, to hear what it's like using Haskell in production. You will hear the story of Channable, and how Haskell worked its way into their code base.
What is the future of Haskell, program generation and AI? I sit down with Matthías Páll Gissurarson and try to figure this out, along with the optimal development setup... and of course, deadlifts! Topics covered: Haskell Typed holes Using AI for code generation Lift weights, not just monads