Ghostty creator and Hashicorp cofounder Mitchell Hashimoto talks with Richard about the development of that high-performance terminal emulator: how he's been building Ghostty, how he does native GUI development while sharing code across platforms, how LLMs have affected both the project and his love of coding, his thoughts on AI ethics, and more. This episode was sponsored by mailtrap.io - modern email delivery for developers. Try Mailtrap for free: https://l.rw.rw/software_unscripted_1 Patreon ...
Feb 17, 2026•1 hr 4 min
Gleam programming language creator Louis Pilfold talks with Richard about Gleam's design and various challenges that came up when implementing its compiler. - Gleam Language - https://gleam.run - Erlang Language - https://www.erlang.org - Elixir Language - https://elixir-lang.org - Roc Language - https://www.roc-lang.org - Hadoukenify https://github.com/reibitto/hadoukenify - presumably based on https://twitter.com/dr4goonis/status/476617165463105536 - "Let-generalization: Let's not?" by Ayaz Ha...
Jan 10, 2026•1 hr 11 min
Harry Goldstein talks with Richard Feldman about the Lean 4 programming language's compile-time metaprogramming capabilities, including how they can be used to control elements of your IDE in realtime. They also discuss other topics like property-based testing, theorem proving, and Smalltalk. You can get ad-free episodes (including video) by supporting Software Unscripted on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/SoftwareUnscripted The Best New Programming Language is a Proof Assistant by Harry Goldst...
Dec 21, 2025•41 min
Jonathan Blow, creator of popular games Braid and The Witness, talks with Richard about programming language design - including the design of the programming language he's been building for game developers. Keynote & Tech Demo - https://youtu.be/IdpD5QIVOKQ ECS and Rust's Borrow Checker - https://youtu.be/4t1K66dMhWk "The 30 Million Line Problem" - https://youtu.be/kZRE7HIO3vk "A New Programming Language for Games" - https://youtu.be/TH9VCN6UkyQ?si=Z5cqazo4QU7AibzB Roc Programming Language -...
Nov 15, 2025•1 hr 42 min
Richard talks with Zig Creator Andrew Kelley. - Support Zig - https://ziglang.org/zsf/ - Zig's "Writergate" - https://ziglang.org/download/0.15.1/release-notes.html#Writergate - "What Color is Your Function?" by Robert Nystrom - https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-your-function/ - "Asynchrony is not Concurrency" by Loris Cro - https://kristoff.it/blog/asynchrony-is-not-concurrency/ - "Data alignment for speed: myth or reality?" by Daniel Lemire - https://lemire.me/blog/20...
Oct 09, 2025•1 hr 49 min
xz vulnerability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor Spectre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerability) Meltdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerability) Heartbleed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed Noah on GitHub https://github.com/eeue56 - Substack https://substack.com/@eeue56 - BlueSky https://bsky.app/profile/derw-lang.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Sep 20, 2025•1 hr
Ladybird Browser - https://ladybird.org SerenityOS - https://serenityos.org Story of the man who used powerlifting to recover after falling off a roof https://startingstrength.com/articles/brian_jones_story.pdf StrongLifts 5x5 - https://stronglifts.com/stronglifts-5x5/ Starting Strength - https://startingstrength.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Sep 01, 2025•1 hr 20 min
Richard talks with Swift, LLVM, Clang, and Mojo creator Chris Lattner about programming on the GPU and on the CPU, as well as a number of programming language design topics. Chris's "Democratizing AI Compute" blog series - https://www.modular.com/blog/democratizing-compute-part-1-deepseeks-impact-on-ai Mojo https://www.modular.com/mojo Roc https://www.roc-lang.org Software Unscripted episode with Futhark language creator https://pod.link/1602572955/episode/00564b1774ebe0e4225a630825ed3dee Claude...
Jul 25, 2025•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 109
Longtime Rust contributor Steve Klabnik talks with Richard about the broken state of AI discourse, from excessive hype to excessive hate, and reasonable alternatives we could pursue instead. Steve's blog post: "I am disappointed in the AI discourse" - https://steveklabnik.com/writing/i-am-disappointed-in-the-ai-discourse/ Deep dive into why Rust's compile times are slow: https://www.pingcap.com/blog/rust-compilation-model-calamity/ Y Combinator partners on "100x productivity" claims: https://www...
Jul 04, 2025•1 hr 20 min•Season 1Ep. 108
Elixir creator José Valim goes into a very deep dive on language design with Richard, centered around some upcoming major design changes to the Roc programming language. - https://elixir-lang.org - https://roc-lang.org - Unison's algebraic effects: https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/fundamentals/abilities/ - Koka's algebraic effects: https://koka-lang.github.io/koka/doc/book.html#why-effects - OCaml's algebraic effects: https://ocaml.org/manual/5.3/effects.html Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/priva...
Jun 01, 2025•2 hr 26 min•Season 1Ep. 107
Monica McGuigan, a Scala programmer at JP Morgan, talks with Richard about her experiences learning Roc with a Scala background. They get into topics like how language design affects beginners and experts, what parts of functional programming are easier and harder to learn than others, and how language designers inform their design decisions. Support Software Unscripted on Patreon: https://patreon.com/SoftwareUnscripted Monica's chapter on JSON decoders: https://github.com/roc-lang/book-of-examp...
Jan 27, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 106
Mike Bryzek has been a technical cofounder of two very successful companies using some very unorthodox technical strategies that have worked out very well for him and his teams! These include testing in production, spending the first few months of a brand-new company's life investing in automation and tooling before shipping a product, and microservices - but not done in the way I've usually heard them described. Support Software Unscripted on Patreon: https://patreon.com/SoftwareUnscripted Host...
Jan 05, 2025•1 hr 18 min•Season 1Ep. 105
Richard talks with Andrew Lisowski, a Senior Engineer at Descript - which makes audio and video editing software that has been used to edit this very podcast! They talk about some of the surprising challenges of dealing with video editing compared to audio alone, the economics of niche podcasts and programming conferences, and the evolution of Web browsers! Support Software Unscripted on Patreon: https://patreon.com/SoftwareUnscripted Descript: https://www.descript.com Andrew Lisowski: https://w...
Dec 16, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 104
Richard talks with Peter Saxton, creator of the EYG programming language, about the problems Peter aims to solve with EYG, and some of the unique design decisions he's made with it. A type-safe eval() operation even comes up in the discussion! Support Software Unscripted on Patreon: https://patreon.com/SoftwareUnscripted EYG: https://eyg.run Unison: https://unison-lang.org Roc: https://roc-lang.org Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Nov 17, 2024•1 hr 17 min•Season 1Ep. 103
Richard talks with Will Sentance, the teacher of the Hard Parts series and the founder and CEO of CodeSmith, which is a Software Engineering and AI immersive education program. They talk about how AI is intersecting with modern programming education, what's considered "fundamentals" these days, and how Will thinks about teaching object-oriented and functional programming. Support Software Unscripted on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/SoftwareUnscripted JavaScript: The Hard Parts: https://fronte...
Oct 16, 2024•59 min•Season 1Ep. 102
Richard talks with Kyle Boddy about the biomechanical and data analysis software Kyle wrote—and continues to write—as the founder and CTO of Driveline Baseball, a data-driven player development company that has landed numerous players in Major League Baseball, including multiple Most Valuable Players and 2024's number one draft pick. They talk about Kyle's background in PHP and the C++ he wrote to coordinate budget high-speed cameras back when Driveline was a one-programmer garage shop, up throu...
Sep 26, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 101
For the 100th episode of Software Unscripted, Richard talks with Chris Lattner, creator of Swift, the Clang C++ compiler, LLVM, and now the Mojo programming language, about Mojo, Roc, API design, compiler optimizations, and language design! "Swift for C++ Practitioners" by Doug Gregor - https://www.douggregor.net/posts/swift-for-cxx-practitioners-value-types/ Mojo - https://www.modular.com/mojo Modular Computing - https://www.modular.com Roc - https://roc-lang.org LLVM - https://llvm.org Clang -...
Aug 30, 2024•1 hr 49 min•Season 1Ep. 100
Richard talks with Eli Dowling about his contributions to the Roc programming language, as well as the intersection of language design and editor tooling, parsers that recover from errors, tree-sitter, going beyond the language server protocol, and the downsides of macros. Perceus paper - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2020/11/perceus-tr-v1.pdf The Koka Programming Language - https://koka-lang.github.io "The Quicksort Talk" (Outperforming Imperative with Pure Functional La...
Aug 21, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 99
Richard talks with Kelly Shortridge about the CrowdStrike Incident that caused many computers worldwide to get stuck in a boot loop on July 19, 2024. A video version of this episode is available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzjaZssBEiI or ad-free to our wonderful Patreon supporters! https://www.patreon.com/posts/109888395 The incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike_incident Kelly Shortridge: https://www.kellyshortridge.com Kelly's book: https://securitychaoseng....
Aug 11, 2024•59 min•Season 1Ep. 98
Richard talks with distributed systems scientist Jonathen Magen about functional programming in distributed systems, including languages like Gleam, Elixir, Ballerina, and Jolie. They also talk about type inference, big data, and a few other topics. Jonathan Magen: https://yonkeltron.com or https://jawns.club/@yonkeltron Programming languages mentioned: https://ballerina.io https://www.jolie-lang.org https://gleam.run https://elixir-lang.org Richard's talk: Why Static Typing Came Back - https://...
Jul 18, 2024•48 min•Season 1Ep. 97
Richard talks with Tom Ballinger about undo and redo in the context of REPLs and running effects, stateful systems in general, hot code loading, and database query planning. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Jul 12, 2024•59 min•Season 1Ep. 96
Richard talks with Juan Vuletich, creator of Cuis Smalltalk, about the past, present and future of Smalltalk - including quite a bit of interesting history and programming philosophy! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Jun 24, 2024•55 min•Season 1Ep. 95
Richard talks with Wolfgang Schuster about his experiences first as a professional game developer, and then later as a professional Web developer. Theytalk about the differences in programming practices he's seen between the two, including things like automated testing, dependency management, and releases. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Jun 16, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 94
Richard talks with Brendan Hansknecht, an AI compiler engineer at Modular, about various testing techniques, including fuzzing, property-based tests, database tests, tests involving network requests, and more! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Jun 04, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 93
Richard talks with Ian Jeffries about his experiences as a Haskeller exploring modern Smalltalk (arguably the original object-oriented programming language), including both the historical context of where Smalltalk came from as well as what it's like using it in a modern context. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
May 25, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 92
Richard talks to Michael Newton, a programmer working as a consultant and trainer who has used several different functional programming languages in professional settings. They talk about the differences Michael has found between using F sharp, Haskell, and Elm, and especially how those differences apply in the context of professional production programming. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
May 13, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 91
Richard talks with Nathan Sobo, founder of Zed Industries (which creates the high-performance Zed code editor) about his time as an early developer on the Atom code editor, including how that project led to Electron. They then discuss how the Zed team has created GPUI, which uses native operating system APIs for events and goes straight to the graphics card for rendering. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
May 04, 2024•1 hr 17 min•Season 1Ep. 90
Richard talks with Lucas Rosa, a compiler engineer working on the Aiken programming language for smart contracts, about tradeoffs in language and compiler design, property-based testing, syntax and familiarity, and compile-time evaluation of constants. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Apr 21, 2024•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 89
Richard talks with Louis Pilfold, creator of the Gleam programming language, about the language's 1.0 release, as well as other topics like backwards compatibility, hot-swapping code in production, and implementing a typed version of Erlang's famous OTP system, which had also been famously considered to be un-typeable. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Apr 02, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Season 1Ep. 88
Richard talks to Thorsten Ball, a programmer at Zed Industries and author of two books on compilers. They start out talking about the differences between compilers and interpreters, what the trickiest parts are of teaching compilers, and then end up talking about the unnecessary complexity that has taken over modern Web Development. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Mar 17, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 87
