Richard Feldman is a software engineer with more than 20 years of experience, a frequent conference speaker, teacher and author of Elm in Action. He's the author of the Roc programming language and is currently working on Zed, the AI-enabled code editor.
Zed: https://zed.dev/
Roc: https://www.roc-lang.org/
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0:00 Intro
1:38 Why Rust's borrow checker didn't help Roc's compiler
6:02 Zig vs Rust for Roc: trade-offs in practice
8:29 Why Richard built Roc
13:11 Roc vs Go for web servers
18:02 Roc's error handling: anonymous sum types
19:44 How Roc measures success
23:22 Roc adoption: the startup pathway
29:54 Platforms and applications: Roc's core design
40:33 Security by design: sandboxing dependencies
55:00 Avoiding monads: Richard's FP philosophy
1:02:36 Empathy as a design principle
1:05:04 Teaching FP: don't start with types
1:09:32 Writing Elm in Action: lessons and regrets
1:17:35 Career decisions: startups and red flags
1:30:08 Fundamentals: API design and OOP skepticism
1:40:14 Roc in the age of AI
1:47:24 Vibe coding and software quality
1:54:51 AI agents for bug reproduction in Roc
2:08:09 What drives Richard: people and products