William Byrd on "The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written" [PWL NYC]

What this video covers

William Byrd presents at Papers We Love NYC on what he calls the most beautiful program ever written, a Lisp interpreter written in Lisp. He walks through the metacircular interpreter and related ideas, and demos relational programming and program synthesis near the end.

Why it surfaced in Hacker News

HN repeatedly recommends it as an amazing talk that derives the essence of Lisp and shows miniKanren-style program synthesis.

Recommendation context

Short excerpts from positive mentions. Open the source to read the full Hacker News discussion.

“There's an amazing talk about it”

“It is fascinating to think of it as the essence of a language in 13 lines.”

“One of my all time favorite YouTube videos is a lecture by William Byrd.”