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Comment by chrislattner | Hacker News Reader

Really sad to see how much of the commentary here is meta-commentary about Lex and not about the content. Several people asked, so here's the reason I chose to go on his show: it's because I love his work (frequent listener) and he's a great person. He asks good questions suitable to a wide audience and he's fun to talk to.

If you don't like his show or style, then you don't have to listen to it. :-)

-Chris

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What most of the HN community seems too misunderstand is that the very nature of being here means you're far more deeply ingrained in tech than most.

Personally I'm almost a layman when it comes to hardware and compiler technologies. When Lex asks basic questions, they are the sort of things I want to hear about.

Sure there's room for a more in-depth/challenging conversation but I don't think that Lex's podcast is the place for that. Theres probably a handful of people who would be able to challenge Chris properly (Maybe a conversation with another LLVM contributor or someone on the Swift team would be interesting).

Loved the podcast Chris, thanks for giving your time and hope you keep doing stuff like this!

My problem is more with the title: "The Future of Computing and Programming Languages" implies some kind of overview and outlook. They more or less discuss a small set of current technologies completely out of context (not even mentioning/hinting at current work/ research directions outside of LLVM and the Swift universe) then venturing off into very speculative topics (in which both are none-experts).

It's a really questionable title and in my opinion bad framing.

Big fan of your work. Yet, some more commentary on the content of the podcast: You are talking about the "Future of Computing" and you are just discussing llvm, c, c++, java, python and swift?

No Haskell, Erlang, Julia, Go ...

A bit disappointing regarding the title of the podcast, don't you think so?

It's impossible to cover "all the things" in one podcast. However, I'm happy to answer specific questions if you have a specific interest.

True, true. Yet, I feel the podcast discusses more the current state, not the future in terms of programming/computing.

When I listened, I was wondering what is a rather obscure language you like and enjoy and why. (I still like hacking OpenDylan from time to time.

For me, Swift seems great for user interfaces and for some os applications (command line etc.). Especially Apple's SwiftUI seem to take the best of d3.js and other libraries. Swift seems perfect and very flexible for that.

Machine Learning and Signal Processing will still be dominated by Python, just because of the libraries. I'm old school and program a lot of matlab ...

Thought I would get more background on your influences and your programming culture.

Lex triggers people for some reason, lol. I could speculate as to why but that's not my area of expertise. :)

For my part I really enjoyed both of your visits to the podcast. The first one really contextualized a lot of the work that I wholly take for granted every day and this just expanded on that. Lex should do an annual State of the Stack series and drag you back in for more :)

I think as usual, most people who like something don't have much to say unless they really like it. Hence why this has enough up-votes to be on the front page but a relatively negative comment section.

For what it's worth, I enjoyed the interview! I wouldn't say I learned anything new, but I don't need that out of everything I listen to.

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