3 - Paul Snively on Programming Languages, Reliable Code and Good Taste in Software Engineering
Apr 25, 2025 • 2h 5m
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About this episode
Paul Snively is a software architect and engineer with 40 years of programming experience. He's worked professionally with a variety of languages, tools and mental models, including Lisp, C, Java, Scala and Haskell, and has held various positions at Apple, Intel, VMWare, Verizon and others. He is also a frequent conference speaker, talking about type systems, functional programming, formal logic and reliable software.
You can find Paul at https://paul-snively.github.io/
0:00 Intro 6:30 Language proliferation: Go, Rust, Scala, and corporate bets 10:00 Scala in production: Twitter, Spark, and Databricks 12:10 Go's appeal: consistency over abstraction ceiling 16:10 Runar Bjarnason, Funnel, and the Verizon Labs team 21:50 Kleisli arrows and HTTP4S explained 30:25 Why purely functional programming: expressions all the way down 36:05 Where correctness matters most: finance, avionics, smart contracts 47:45 TypeScript's success: syntax, ecosystem fit, and .d.ts files 58:55 Scala's adoption problem and the abstraction ceiling 1:03:40 Direct style, Ox, Kyo, and lowering the FP on-ramp 1:11:50 How to develop taste and intuition in software 1:20:00 Apprenticeship, stupid questions, and the monad epiphany 1:33:00 Shipping System 7.0 with 1,500 known bugs: Apple and business tradeoffs 1:41:30 OCaml: governance, stability, and Jane Street 1:53:50 ReasonML and language recommendations for beginners 1:57:00 Paradigms over languages: Smalltalk, Prolog, Haskell, C