Why do the "worst" programming languages win? Two engineers who helped build the modern internet go head-to-head on PHP, JavaScript, C++, and the languages that SHOULD have won — plus whether LLMs can actually be trusted to write code.

Keith Adams (built the HHVM JIT compiler at Facebook, VMware employee ~80, now at Slack) and Julien Verlaguet (Skip Labs CEO) debate the messy reality of software engineering.

Why did JavaScript and PHP — the "poster boys" of quirky, idiosyncratic design — become the backbone of the web while technically superior languages like OCaml stayed niche? And in an era of AI coding assistants, does "taste" still matter?

🎧 From the engineers behind HHVM, VMware, and Skip Labs.

Chapters:
00:00 — Intro: Hits in programming languages
02:27 — The x86 analogy: messy tech that wins commercially
05:00 — JavaScript, the poster boy for "worse is better"
07:00 — Non-transitive equality & the horrors of type coercion
11:00 — The Lisp Core: what dynamic languages could have been
13:00 — The Repurposed JIT phenomenon (overfitting in VMs)
19:00 — Why popular languages make tool-building "impossible"
29:00 — How PHP won the web
32:00 — OCaml's mystery: why the "perfect" language lost
45:00 — C++'s "false advertisement" (no real abstractions)
1:22:13 — Can LLMs develop taste?
1:29:15 — AGI isn't around the corner; LLMs can't be trusted yet
1:37:23 — 2050: when machines understand code better than us

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From the Computers, Coffee & Beer podcast — Keith Adams and Julien Verlaguet dig into what who helped build the modern internet sharing their honest takes on the biggest ideas in tech.

🎧 Full episodes on YouTube + your favorite podcast app.
@ComputersCoffeeandBeer

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Channel About:

Computers, Coffee, & Beer is hosted by Keith Adams and Julien Verlaguet — two engineers who helped shape the modern internet and have the war stories to prove it.

Keith built the HHVM JIT compiler at Facebook, helped virtualize the world at VMware (employee ~80), and went on to Slack before founding Pebblebed, an early-stage VC firm for technically ambitious founders.

Julien created the Hack programming language, spent years writing safety-critical compiler software for Airbus and nuclear plants, and now runs Skip Labs.

Together they dig into the systems, languages, and decisions behind the technology that actually runs the world — told by two people who were in the room when it happened.

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#programming #programminglanguages #javascript #php #softwareengineering #ai #coding