Join us as Thomas Petricek, a program and language researcher, discusses the diverse "cultures of programming," highlighting how a humanistic approach can foster better understanding and interaction with software, moving beyond mere automation.

• Our previous episodes can be found here: https://jb.gg/rsrch-pdcst
• Find out more about JetBrains Research here: https://jb.gg/rsrch

Chapters

00:00:00 Programming Cultures Overview

00:01:41 Thomas's Background 00:03:50 Current Research Focus

00:06:05 Code Poetry Explained

00:09:00 Critical Software Architecture

00:11:51 Cultures of Programming

00:17:27 Mathematical Culture

00:22:39 Hacker Culture

00:25:32 Tacit Hacker Knowledge

00:30:00 Tacit Knowledge Undervalued

00:38:43 Managerial Culture

00:40:20 Engineering Culture

00:44:48 Spec-Driven Development

00:51:48 Humanistic Culture

00:54:40 Programming Field Pluralism

00:56:48 Personal Cultural Sympathies

01:01:21 AI and Future Cultures

01:04:14 Lessons from History

01:06:17 Making Programming Easy

01:09:09 Future Research Directions

01:11:43 Take-Home Message

01:13:20 Advice for JetBrains

Mentions & Links:

• Tomas Petricek https://tomasp.net/
• "Cultures of Programming" book https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cultures-of-programming/075A2D1DE611EE47807A683147B21691
• Psychology of Programming Interest Group (PPIG) https://www.ppig.org/
• Code Poetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_poetry
• Whitespace Programming Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language)
• CompCert https://compcert.org/compcert-C.html -Smalltalk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk
• On the Limits of Making Programming Easy https://tomasp.net/academic/papers/limits/

In our newest episode, we chat with Alexander Kulikov, head of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence B.Sc. program at Neapolis University Pafos.

Episode links:

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderskulikov/
• https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-structures-algorithms https://cogniterra.org/course/697/promo
• https://compeau.cbd.cmu.edu/online-education-projects/programming-for-lovers/
• https://lean-lang.org/ https://www.manim.community/

Our previous episodes can be found here: https://jb.gg/rsrch-pdcst

Find out more about JetBrains Research here: https://jb.gg/rsrch

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction and STACS Conference

02:00 – AI in Theoretical Computer Science

04:30 – Bachelor Program and Evolving Curriculums

08:30 – Boolean Circuit Synthesis Competitions

12:00 – The "Game of Life" and Modern AI Iterations

16:45 – LLMs Winning IMO Medals 22:00 – Formal Verification and the Lean Language

25:30 – The Chess Analogy: AI Replacing Mathematicians

33:00 – AI Coding Agents and Don Knuth's $2.56 Check

38:30 – Distributed Algorithms and Complexity Theory

41:00 – Large-Scale Online Education and Adding JavaScript

48:45 – The Importance of Algorithmic Thinking

56:00 – Real-World Application: The Google Maps Polygon Problem

1:01:30 – Bioinformatics, SPAdes, and Fundamental vs. Applied Research

1:10:00 – Sabbatical Dreams: P vs. NP and Linear Time Limits

1:18:00 – Creating Mathematical Animations with Python

1:21:30 – AI Interpolation vs. Extrapolation and Joke Generation

1:25:00 – "Birds vs. Frogs": Research Styles in the AI Era

1:30:15 – Surprises, Rapid Changes, and the Future of AI

1:33:30 – Advice for New PhD Students: Follow Your Passion

1:36:30 – Outro and Final Thoughts

In our second episode, we chat with Ibragim Badertdinov from Nebius about SWE-rebench, coding agents, and his path from dentistry and AI.

Our first episode can be found here

Episode links:

• SWE-rebench: https://swe-rebench.com/
• ConTree: https://contree.dev/
• Ibragim: https://x.com/ibragim_bad

Also mentioned:

• https://huggingface.co/datasets/nebius/SWE-bench-extra
• https://scale.com/leaderboard/swe_bench_pro_public
• https://swe-bench-live.github.io/

Find out more about JetBrains Research: https://lp.jetbrains.com/research/software-engineering/

Chapters:

00:00:00 Teaser & Introduction

00:02:41 Ibrahim's Non-Traditional Background: From Dentistry to Tech

00:10:45 The "School 42" Bootcamp Experience

00:13:00 Getting into Machine Learning & Kaggle

00:17:20 The First Internship & Learning from a Great Mentor

00:20:10 Contrasting the Worlds of Medicine and Tech

00:26:56 What Are Coding Agents?

00:33:40 Explaining SWE-bench: How Coding Tasks Are Evaluated

00:37:15 RLVR (Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards)

00:43:10 The Creation of SWE-Rebench

00:50:00 The Main Challenges with Task Quality and Scale

00:55:00 What's New in SWE-Rebench V2 (and Kotlin support)

00:58:42 Will AI Change Code Review?

01:02:00 contree.dev: A New Checkpointing & Forking Tool for Agents

01:09:35 The Open-Source Community's Reaction to SWE-Rebench

01:15:20 SWE-Bench Pro vs. SWE-Rebench

01:18:20 Why Nebius Invests in Open-Source Research

01:21:00 Predictions for the Future of AI and Programming

01:26:00 Final Advice for Career Switchers

We discuss the legacy of OpenCV, the future of Computer Vision, how AI can transform professional sports through biomechanics, and why real-world technology adoption remains so slow.

Episode links

OpenCV: https://opencv.org/

FitWise AI: https://www.thefitwise.com/

Anna Kogan: linkedin: / anna-kogan-44b24673