Listen "#49 Self-Education in PL - Ryan Brewer"
Episode Synopsis
Ryan Brewer is a college dropout who has an incredible blog about PL, Category Theory and Logic. He better define his goal as making Formal Theory more accessible outside the ivory tower of academia, and easier to put into practice where it matters.
He has a couple of very interesting main projects, such as the first Cedille 2 Interpreter, Saber VM, and Arctic.
In this episode we will talk about all of his projects. His trajectory becoming self-taught in PL, compilers and Formal Methods, and he shares with us the wealth of resources he used to navigate this sea of knowledge. We also have a brief but heated discussion on the ethics of Science.
0:00 – Intro & Podcast Community
3:40 – How Ryan Started Learning Programming Languages
12:40 – Projects, Category Theory & Early Experiences
18:00 – College Life, Dropping Out & Study Strategies
27:00 – Landing a Developer Job Without a Degree
32:00 – Thoughts on JavaScript, TypeScript & WebAssembly
37:00 – Building Arctic: A Compiler for Blogs
41:00 – Introduction to Gleam & Its Unique Features
48:00 – Functional Programming at Work & Community Impact
59:00 – Diving into Haskell and Category Theory
1:08:30 – Ethical Considerations in Software Licensing
1:20:00 – Reflections on Academia & Learning
1:32:30 – Job Interviews & Practical Programming Tools
1:38:00 – Dan on Academia and Podcasting Philosophy
1:54:00 – Final Reflections & Advice for Self-Learners
2:05:00 – Closing Thoughts, Blog, Open Source
2:19:58 – Outro
Links
Ryan's Website
Saber VM
Arctic, which is built on top of Lustre
Category Theory Wiki
More episodes of the podcast Type Theory Forall
#51 s/Coq/Rocq - Nicolas Tabareau
04/06/2025
#48 Bell Labs - David MacQueen
21/01/2025
ZARZA We are Zarza, the prestigious firm behind major projects in information technology.