Patrick Collison
speaker
460 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 28 Apr
Patrick Collison’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
There's no continuation based framework in in Ruby.
Um and uh kind of searching around, I found that there was um uh a good one that had just been written in Smalltalk.
Um so I decided to play with it a little bit.
And then I found that Smalltalk is actually this extremely interesting development environment um that had a lot a lot of the aspects of Lisp that I'd really appreciate it there, like um, you know, an a a fully interactive environment with a proper
Debugger so that you can edit the code while in the middle of some web request or deep in some stack trace or something.
And you could, for example, encounter an error with some web request, edit the code to fix the error, and then resume higher up in the stack such that the entire web request would just complete.
And so rather than this kind of an
Annoying feedback loop of having to add some log statements and like do this binary search, like find the problem, and eventually deploy a fixed version, you know, a process that could take an hour, you could just like literally inspect the stack frame, see which variable has the wrong value, fix it, like you know, jump back up, hit proceed, and have the whole thing work.
So anyway, the point is uh in the hunt for this continuation-based web framework, uh, realize that Smalltalk in general had
Just a much more powerful development environment as compared to Ruby/slash as compared to b basically every other mainstream programming language.
Um and so we we decided to yeah use it for the company, which in hindsight was
I mean, I don't know if it's a terrible decision or not.
Uh the reason I think one would think it would be terrible uh is that it would be you know hard to hire people and hard to scale and you know whatever.
It wasn't hard to hire people, or rather, nobody knew it, but it was easy to teach them.
The company did they know before they joined?
No, no.
But it w they learned really quickly.
Um and then you have smart people learn languages really quickly.
Uh so I don't I don't think that's really a reason not to use a non-mainstream language.
The company didn't work, I think for unrelated reasons.
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