42. Programming languages; from .NET and C# to JavaScript, from Python to Rust, and even Rockstar - with Dylan Beattie

In this episode, we talk to Dylan Beattie, who is a Microsoft MVP and international keynote speaker. He is the director of Ursatile, the creator of the Rockstar programming language, and has performed his software-themed parodies of classic rock songs all over the world as Dylan Beattie and the Linebreakers. We talk about his programming language – Rockstar - in which he writes programs that resemble bad song lyrics. It started as a joke, but it actually worked and went viral. And how it made him use technologies like Rust, Scala and Python, or techniques like building interpreters in JavaScript, parsing expression grammar, recursive descent parsing, continuation passing, flow control, and more. We dive deeper into the fact that people do better work when they are enjoying themselves. Real software development is a craft, where we solve problems that have never been solved before. It can be a difficult and frustrating process; you get stuck and we underestimate how much time it can take. Sometimes you have to step back and do something else to get that creative process going again – tip: take a notebook with you so you don’t forget your good ideas. We also discuss the basics every developer should know, what skills a developer should have, and how there are three kinds of software that you might write. And, last but not least, we talk about how Windows as a development platform has gotten a lot better in the last 25 years, about different programming languages, especially C# and .NET, about (programming) language proficiency versus fluency, about translating programming expertise from one language to another, and his love for JavaScript.
About this episode, and Dylan Beattie in particular: you can find @dylanbeattie on Twitter and GitHub. Check out his website dylanbeattie.net and The Rockstar programming language at codewithrockstar.com. And, listen to 'Dylan Beattie and the Linebreakers' music on his YouTube channel.
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