I enjoy this podcast. It is tightly enough scoped to be predictably interesting but not so narrow as to be repetitive. It takes on higher density more structured content than the typical panel discussion / interview show. I like the mix of past thought leaders and present thoughts. The audio quality is good but it doesn’t include a lot of fluffy “production” to waste time and distract from content (rarer to get one without the other these days). I wish the episode notes included more links to the materials and references covered but otherwise a very strong feed.

This podcast’s descriptions and analyses of the problems that occur in coding are spot-on. Eric has got to be the most thoughtful and experienced speaker in the tech podcasting world.

Coming from an imperative/OOP background in JavaScript and C++, I always found function programming to be completely foreign, both in its paradigm and its terminology. This podcast has helped me bridge some of the gaps in my mind. To be honest, I had to do a lot of reading and watching videos about basic category/type theory in order to really understand what was going on. I’m not sure there is any way around that. It’s difficult to approach if you don’t have a strong foundation in math. However, Eric does a good job of explaining some fundamental concepts in a way I could easily comprehend. Listen to this if you want to bridge your gap knowledge gap and step into the world of FP.

The positives are that this podcasts is presented with extraordinary attention to good teaching— modest pace, repetition, stick to one topic, and assignments. The negatives however include inaccurate information, e.g. the dialog confuses associativity commutativity and idempotence and fails to observe for the listener when certain claims are the result of theses effects in concrete not individually. E.g. most of the claims on commutativity fail if the operation is not also associative. Perhaps more concerning is that the lesson focus on saying a word and describe an example of an abstraction it represents. But they do not add any thing new. E.g. it is claimed at the start that the listener will know how to make things have some abstraction when in fact the lesson given is to observe something in your code base already has a behavior and then label it that way. There is no guidance to pull in abstraction from well studied and optimized libraries which is where the power of these observations lives. Frankly time is best spent listening to experts however tough they present there topics. But perhaps this will improve.

I really like the format and topics Eric tends to extrapolate on. Nice small pieces of insight from a really talented software engineer. Thanks!!