Best programming language | Brian Armstrong and Lex Fridman

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Brian Armstrong is the CEO of Coinbase.

PODCAST INFO:

SOCIAL:

[chrisfaux]

Please Lex don’t stop to interview people in the tech field and ask this kind of questions. As a software engineer listening to experts in their field about this stuff is awesome. As you said, I would love to hear from someone that still maintains old language codebases.

[barlobarlo]

Several commenters are calling COBOL, Cobalt. Cobalt is an element with atomic number of 27. COBOL, a programming language, stands for Common Business-Oriented Language.

[wendyg]

I still have the printout of a program I wrote in BASIC from '85 somewhere.
Our teacher was amazing.. he would go to Silicon Valley on his away year.
We were amongst the early classes of school computing in our country, but some of the others in class were learning C, Cobol and Fortran to memory extracurricular.
Hope to connect again sometime Mr Butler... maybe you catch Lex's podcasts too. :)

[BueDvi]

Wow! Didn’t expect to hear any love for Ruby! My personal fav.

[stefanaursulesei]

I find it very sad that functional languages are considered "hardcore". That's probably because of the reputation of Haskell's monads, but functional programming doesn't have to be pure. And it's really about making things easier and more manageable - they offer significantly fewer opportunities to shoot yourself in the foot. Functional-first languages like F#, O'CAML or Scala offer the best of all worlds since you can also write imperative and OOP code in them if needed.

[EJ-muhe]

Brian’s comment about Java being “scary” was 100% correct for me… I switched to CS early in my college career and my “intro” coding class was learning Java… I dropped that class thinking “maybe this isn’t for me”. Found my way back to coding but am glad to hear that reputable people in the field feel that it’s too complex to begin with, and that Java isn’t generally used as the “intro” class anymore.

[p-d]

@5:00 "Cobalt"
What, no mention of Formtram, Allgoal, and Piscal ?

[berninme]

Nice to see ruby get some much deserved love. I love Matz philosophy of making the language enjoyable and productive for the programmer first.

[cbreezy]

I took a university course in 2020 on theory and design of programming languages. Haskell was used as the language of choice for the portion dedicated to functional programming.

[pugix]

My first program was written in LSI 11 machine code. Ha ha. Ruby would be a good first programming language. I programmed for years in C, then moved to Java (which was in part designed for easy adoption by C programmers). Then I moved to Groovy, a Java language superset with a lot of Ruby-like features. Groovy is really fun to program, and to write unit tests with. The Groovy server side web stack, Grails, made it too easy to write bad code and it has so many layers it's hard to understand and debug.

Coding is much harder to do well than most people think. It's not just writing code, but understanding the execution environment, concurrency, dependencies, and so forth. Not to mention the dual representation of data as numbers and as visual display. Quick test: What is the difference between a number and a numeral?

[omotoye]

Lisp is still used for writing PDDL problem and domain files, but you learn to get used to the excessive parenthesis over time.

[franciscoflamenco]

I learned to program in Matlab during university (engineering major), which sadly taught me basically nothing about how software actually works. I then picked up Python, C and some basic C++ through the rest of uni, and yet my first job required me to use Java instead. I'm extremely thankful to IntelliJ for carrying me through that job, for it wouldn't be until much later that I truly understood the core concepts of Java and OOP.

While I'm very fond of Python and C (and others), the first time I truly fell in love with programming was through Elixir and Clojure, year later.

[LearnDriveNYC]

Cobolt or COBOL? That was my 2nd programming language. My 1st was Apple Basic on an Apple IIC

[senju]

Hey! I grew up on FORTRAN and BASIC. I remember creating my first game on Apple 2 using Basic as well. The good old I should have kept my 3.5 floppy disks x 15 of them. When I started work, I was requested to learn IBM OS2. Anyone remember that OS?

[babaayman]

Um Yeah, that is a really good idea, would it be possible to get a video explaining those old systems?

[henrybright]

My first program was a tip calculator with Python

[ThexBorg]

LISP was one of the first programming languages, but Autodesk still use it a lot for extending functionality.
NASA was a big user and the stories of coders trying to debug LISP for missions like Pathfinder.

[DaygoG]

As someone who isn't in this field but just likes to listen to the lingo, all of this sounds so alien. So far I've heard of pythons somehow Django is involved now 🤔 😂 I like the way you code boy. There's a ruby and php there's stacks, and now they have old world relics like lisp. Fascinating.

[jpcampbell]

I love PHP. Use it daily. You have to respect how quickly you can learn it and build robust systems with it. It only gets better over time. But the first languages we learned at Rice University Comp Sci program in 1994 were Lisp and Scheme.

[jonasweinberg]

Any chance you might interview David Rutten, or Robert McNeel?
A huge portion of modern architecture is built using software created by the them and their teams.