Patrick Collison on Stripe’s Early Choices, Smalltalk, and What Comes After Coding
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What does Michael Truell want to discuss with Patrick Collison at the start of the episode?
It's interesting to me that we haven't experimented in some sense that much with the paradigm of programming over the past twenty years. Yes. If you put those together, you now have the ability to, again, at the kind of level of the individual cell, to read, think, and to write. And this starts to really feel like a new kind of Turing loop and to have its own sort of completeness. I think that's a case where the right API design, the right abstraction design uh ends up having just quite significant business um ramifications. I think the basic idea of as development environment and not just text editor is really the right idea and that's the thing I want to see a return to.
Patrick Collison wrote his first startup in Smalltalk. Its development environment let him fix errors mid-request, inspect stack frames, and resume execution. And he wanted that more than he wanted a mainstream language. He and his brother chose Ruby and MongoDB for stripe instead. Those decisions still define the company fifteen years and forty-four seconds of annual downtime later. Now Stripe is shipping V2 APIs, rewriting core abstractions first designed in 2010. It's taken years. Defining the new APIs is the easy part. Making them work alongside everything already built on the old ones is, as Carlson put it, more like an instruction set migration than a product launch. This conversation previously aired on Cursors Podcast also gets into why AI hasn't moved productivity numbers, what today's dev environment could steal from Lisp machines, and Collison's work at ARC on foundational models for biology.
Michael Truell, CEO of Cursor, sits down with Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe.
Well it's great to have you. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. Great to be here. Yes. I've heard that your first startup was written in Smalltalk. Please explain. I don't know what there
is to explain. It's the best programming language. Um well uh I had I'd worked on Lisp and Lisp dialects uh before that. And uh actually I I'd worked on Lisp Web Frameworks. And uh when we went to build our first startup, uh we we we first wrote it in We f we first implemented it in Rails, and then I found compared to Lisp that development process kind of frustrating. And I mean we don't need to get into full details, but I thought that continuation-based web frameworks were really the right way to implement web applications. Uh there were no continuations uh in 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.
Why did Patrick Collison write his first startup in Smalltalk and what features did he love about it?
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.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What does Michael Truell want to discuss with Patrick Collison at the start of the episode?
0:00–3:33
2
Why did Patrick Collison write his first startup in Smalltalk and what features did he love about it?
3:33–4:16
3
What were the reasons behind Stripe’s early choices of Ruby and MongoDB and how have they impacted the company?
4:16–4:47
4
How is Stripe redesigning its core APIs in the V2 rollout and what challenges does that involve?
4:47–23:52
5
What was the early AI bot Patrick built in Lisp and how did it perform against the Turing test?
23:52–43:24
6
Why does Patrick advocate for a return to powerful, integrated development environments like Smalltalk’s?
43:24–52:38
Speakers
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