Alpaca festival and conference on algorithmic patterns in the creative arts
In-person talks+workshops+concerts+algorave in Sheffield, much of which will be streamed online, from 12-14th September 2025
Then continuing as on-line conference into the following weekend, with in-person watch parties/hubs in Barcelona, Berlin, Linz and Sheffield
Features a fair amount of live coding, including a paper from the mysterious 'pastagang'
Full info and line-up/schedule:
Wrote a little followup to the post from last week based on the conversation with @Jonathan Frederickson and @D. Schmudde: worksonmymachine.ai/p/safe-is-what-we-call-things-later
📝 Safe Is What We Call Things Later
Some Software Engineering Folklore
Nice article! Minor quibble:
You can tell what type of programmer you were taught by based on which part of object-oriented programming they teach first. Did your teacher start with inheritance? Class hierarchies, abstract base classes, the whole "a Dog is-a Mammal is-an Animal" taxonomy? Then you were taught by what we call a formalist . They showed you the blueprints before they showed you the building.
I was taught by a formalist, but I just wasn't taught OO for the longest time! I learned programming with functions and records. Fortran then COBOL then Pascal then C in the first couple of years. I don't know, is this uncommon? Perhaps because of this educational trajectory, I tend to associate what you call the formalist camp with Fortran and Algol, and the informalist camp with Lisp. Lisp was the original fun thing that empowered people to try things out without thinking too hard about failure. The different kinds of OO just attached to camps that already existed.
(My prejudice: OO is just not that important. A hype cycle among many, 25 years from anything interesting in either direction.)
Huh that's super interesting...you know...I left Lisp out because I'm not super familiar with all the details there (or would have known that Fortran/Algol would be the Formalist camp languages)...but I guess one way of looking at that was just the previous pendulum swing before where my story started 🙂
I wish I knew more of the folklore around Lisp...from what I've picked up...it kind of looks a bit like it's trajectory rhymes a bit with javascript/typescript...where it comes out as this informalist, fun empowering thing and then changed based on the businesses built up around it into something a bit more formal? At least from a popular usage standpoint?
Actually there's probably something really interesting to learn about the evolution of lisp over time - I remember Ruby is an Acceptable LISP and then at the same time you have Richard Gabriel talking about why LISP failed in The Rise of Worse is Better and Steve Yegge in Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus talks about the Clojure community being more on the "strongly conservative" end of his spectrum.
I wonder if that's just the trajectory that the highly informal languages that get popular go through?
