Thinking outside the box of code (Interview)

Leslie Lamport is a computer scientist & mathematician who won ACM’s Turing Award in 2013 for his fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of distributed and concurrent systems. He also created LaTeX and TLA+, a high-level language for “writing down the ideas that go into the program before you do any coding.”

Leave us a comment

Changelog++ members save 7 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

• Tailscale – Simple, secure networks for teams of any scale. Built on WireGuard.
• Sentry – Watch Lazar Nikolov livestream on YouTube at youtube.com/@nikolovlazar. Use the code CHANGELOGMEDIA and get the team plan FREE for six (6) months.

Featuring:

• Leslie Lamport –
• Jerod Santo – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn

Show Notes:

• Leslie Lamport - A.M. Turing Award Laureate
• The Man Who Revolutionized Computer Science With Math - YouTube
• TLA+ Helps Programmers Squash Bugs Before Coding - IEEE Spectrum
  The TLA+ Home Page

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Timestamps:

(00:00) - This week on The Changelog
(00:56) - Sponsor: Tailscale
(04:32) - Start the show!
(04:53) - Leslie & LaTeX
(07:03) - Separating the ideas
(10:54) - Thinking like a mathematician
(14:02) - Coding is like typing
(21:13) - "Let's get coding"
(25:01) - You don't know until you know
(28:35) - Thinking in algorithms
(34:14) - Sponsor: Sentry
(37:52) - What's different today?
(40:55) - What makes a system distributed
(43:53) - The movie metaphor
(49:51) - Stuttering insensitivity
(52:19) - The Bakery Algorithm
(58:21) - The day of discovery
(1:01:57) - Back to the editor
(1:03:56) - Leslie's work these days
(1:05:20) - Final words
(1:06:07) - Up next...