Why Lisp Thrives In The Age Of AI (with Cameron Barré)

About this episode

Earlier this year it looked like AI might kill programming language innovation. Coding agents were at their best in the mainstream languages with decades of training data, which made the barrier to adopting anything new higher than ever. That's changed. With the right skills files, an agent will write Haskell or Gleam as happily as Java, and that flips the situation on its head: it's never been cheaper to take a new language, or a new architecture, out for a test drive. All we need is ideas worth trying. So this week I'm joined by an enthusiastic proponent of a language, an architecture and a library you might want to try. Cameron Barré is a long-time Clojure programmer and the author of Grain, an open-source library for building event-sourced information systems. We start with what makes a system simple or complex, and the difference between essential and accidental complexity. Then we look at why Cameron thinks Lisp is an excellent choice for expressing both code and constraints, and why a live REPL might matter even more to an agent than it does to a human. From there we get into event modeling, an architecture so simple to understand that even a clanker can get it right, and h