The Art of Code - Dylan Beattie
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN regularly names it among the best programming talks ever, praising the storytelling, the demos and the ending.
What it is
Dylan Beattie's NDC London talk on code written for art, fun and curiosity rather than utility. It includes quines, live music programming with Sonic Pi, and a memorable closing.
Recommended by 6 HN commenters across 6 different months, 2020 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec hans0l074 · 2020-05 · on “Quines: self-replicating programs (2005)”
I watched this video recently: [this video] - and it's one of the best programming related ones I've seen in recent times. Really well presented as well - and he talks about various Quines - I won't spoil it for anyone.
Strong rec akritrime · 2020-12 · on “Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?”
For me, it was Art of Code by Dylan Beattie, but mostly because that talk has the best ending[0] I have seen. Also, introduced to me a side of programming that I instinctively knew existed but never sought out. [0]: [this video]
Strong rec david_allison · 2022-03 · on “Overtone is live programmable music and visualization”
One of my favourite talks has a demonstration of FizzBuzz in Sonic Pi. It still blows me away [this video] - whole talk is worth a watch [this video] - timestamp
Strong rec doodpants · 2022-05 · on “An uroboros program with 100 programming languages”
This quine is discussed (among other topics) in The Art of Code[0], one of the most captivating tech talks I've ever seen. [0] [this video]
Recommends newswasboring · 2021-12 · on “Ask HN: Best Tech Talks”
Any talk by Dylan Beattie[1,2] or David Beasley[3,4]. I think they are quite unique in their presentation, they tell a story. [1] [this video] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK]
Recommends WaffleIronMaker · 2023-07 · on “Unicode is harder than you think”
I also really enjoy Dylan Beattie's work. For those with some spare time, who might like to see a true "rockstar" programmer, you may like "The Art of Code"[0]. [0] [this video]
Cites sirnicolaz · 2022-10 · on “A Ruby program that generates itself through a 128-language quine loop”
In this video (where among the other things they explain huroboro), they show an example of code that prints out exactly the same output (itself) whether it's compiled/executed in c, python or ruby [this video]
Cites sdht0 · 2024-03 · on “What if I’m wrong? (2023)”
Thank you for detailed response. > to summarize where we are at this point I think it's a fair summary, yes. I hope you understand by now my views on the words "sustains" and "caused": (possibly) passive, not active. > Whereas your position is that concepts are meaningless, or somehow like 'images' perhaps, or cardboard cut-outs, and perhaps only exist in human minds Ah no. I'll try to clarify. So what is our overall goal? We exist. We sense a universe. And we're trying to explain where we and this universe came from. By logic, there has to be some First Cause. But we don't know the properties of this First Cause directly. We can only observe the effects and try to surmise what First Cause c