The Programming Languages Podcast with Fexingo: Python, Rust, JavaScript, and Modern Coding

Software supply chain attacks hit a new record in Q1 2026, with the number of malicious packages discovered on public registries up 80 percent year-over-year. Lucas and Luna break down how a single compromised npm package called 'event-stream' in 2018 foreshadowed today's crisis, and examine the new defenses developers are adopting: signature-based attestation from the Sigstore project, dependency...

Lucas and Luna dive into the rise of Kotlin Multiplatform in 2026. They explain how JetBrains' language is enabling true code sharing across iOS, Android, and web, with a focus on practical adoption at companies like Netflix and Uber. The episode unpacks how Kotlin's compiler and concurrency model give it an edge over Flutter and React Native, and why developers are moving beyond the JVM to target...

Episode 27 of The Programming Languages Podcast explores Zig—a systems language that's gaining traction among embedded developers, game engine builders, and CLI tool authors. Lucas explains how Zig's compile-time execution replaces C macros, its lack of hidden control flow makes performance predictable, and its cross-compilation story solves the 'just works on my machine' problem. Luna asks whethe...

Episode 26 of The Programming Languages Podcast explores why Go has become the default language for cloud-native infrastructure. Lucas and Luna trace Go's rise from a 2009 experiment at Google to powering tools like Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform. They break down what makes Go different: its goroutine concurrency model, fast compilation, and the controversial decision to omit generics for a dec...

In this episode of The Programming Languages Podcast, Lucas and Luna explore why Rust is increasingly replacing Python for systems-level programming in 2026, focusing on a specific case: how a major fintech startup migrated its core transaction engine from Python to Rust, cutting latency by 80% and eliminating memory-safety bugs. They discuss Rust's ownership model, the trade-offs in developer pro...

In this episode of The Programming Languages Podcast, Lucas and Luna explore how TypeScript has become the dominant language for web development by June 2026, surpassing JavaScript in enterprise adoption. They break down why TypeScript's type system saves teams from costly runtime errors, how Microsoft's strategy of gradual adoption won over developers, and why even die-hard JavaScript fans are ma...

In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore why the Python community is deliberately holding off on a Python 4.0 release despite increasing pressure from performance-hungry domains like AI inference and real-time data pipelines. They unpack the core tension: Python 3.x has become too stable and too widely embedded to risk a major version break. The discussion focuses on the Python Steering Council's r...

Lucas and Luna dive into the quiet crisis of semantic versioning—how the 20-year-old convention of MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH is failing modern dependency management. They unpack the real-world example of the left-pad incident, explain why 'breaking change' has become a meaningless label, and explore how tools like Rust's Cargo and the Go module system are experimenting with alternatives. Specific numbers:...

Episode 21 of The Programming Languages Podcast digs into the rapidly shifting landscape of AI coding assistants. Lucas and Luna explore why GitHub Copilot — once the market leader — is facing real competition from tools like Anthropic's Claude Code, JetBrains AI, and Cursor. They examine a concrete case: how a mid-sized startup replaced Copilot with Claude Code and saw a 40% reduction in code rev...

Episode 20 dives into GraphQL's surprising second life. Five years after the backlash, GraphQL is quietly powering major architectures at GitHub, Shopify, and Netflix. Lucas and Luna unpack the real reason adoption rebounded — not because of the query language itself, but because of a tiny caching layer called the 'persisted query registry'. They walk through how GitHub cut API latency by 40 perce...

Episode 19 explores Haskell's quiet but powerful role in 2026's software landscape. Lucas and Luna examine how this purely functional language, often seen as academic, is powering critical systems at companies like Facebook, GitHub, and Cardano. They discuss Haskell's unique strengths in correctness, concurrency, and domain-specific languages, and why it remains relevant despite competition from R...

When you think of programming languages in finance, Python and C++ usually come to mind. But for decades, OCaml has quietly powered some of the most latency-sensitive and correctness-critical trading systems on Wall Street. In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore why quantitative finance firms like Jane Street and Citadel Securities bet big on this functional programming language — from its strong...

In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore why Dart—the language behind Google's Flutter—has become the dominant force in cross-platform mobile and desktop development in 2026. They trace its unexpected rise from a niche web language to powering over 30% of new app launches on the iOS and Android app stores, according to recent data from app analytics firm Sensor Tower. The hosts dive into Flutter's...

Lucas and Luna dive into WebAssembly’s unexpected second life: powering edge computing. They trace how a technology originally designed to bring native-speed code to browsers is now running server-side functions at the edge, slashing cold-start times from hundreds of milliseconds to under a millisecond. The hosts break down a real-world case: a large e-commerce platform that cut its checkout laten...

In this episode, Lucas and Luna dive into the origin story of Elixir—a language born from José Valim's frustration with Ruby's concurrency limits. They unpack how Elixir's actor model, built on the Erlang VM, powers fault-tolerant systems like Discord's 5 million concurrent voice users. The hosts walk through real-world challenges: how Elixir's OTP (Open Telecom Platform) allows hot code swapping...

In this episode of The Programming Languages Podcast, Lucas and Luna explore Carbon, the experimental language from Google designed as a successor to C++. They unpack why Carbon was created, how it aims to fix C++'s legacy pain points without breaking existing codebases, and the current state of its open-source development in 2026. The conversation contrasts Carbon with Rust's memory-safety approa...

Episode 13 of The Programming Languages Podcast dives into Lua, the lightweight scripting language that quietly powers everything from World of Warcraft addons to Redis scripts and embedded IoT devices. Lucas explains how Lua's simple C API, small footprint, and fast interpreter made it the go-to embedded language, while Luna questions why it hasn't broken into broader application development. The...

Episode 12 explores how AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot, Amazon CodeWhisperer, and Google's Gemini for Code are changing the way developers write software. Lucas and Luna discuss real-world adoption rates, productivity gains, and the shift from writing code to reviewing and prompting. They dive into the economics of these tools, the debate over code quality, and what this means for junior...

In episode 11 of The Programming Languages Podcast, Lucas and Luna dive into JSON — the unglamorous data format that quietly powers everything from REST APIs to machine learning pipelines. They unpack why JSON won the format wars, how it broke XML's grip, and where its limits start to show (no types, no comments, no streaming). Lucas digs into the recent IETF RFC 9427 updates that finally standard...

Episode 10 of The Programming Languages Podcast with Fexingo explores the surprising resurgence of SQL in 2026. Lucas and Luna dive into why SQL—often dismissed as a legacy language—is now being embraced by data engineers, ML practitioners, and even frontend developers. They discuss the rise of DuckDB, the adoption of SQL-based transformations in tools like dbt, and how new SQL extensions for vect...

A SaaS company's 17,000-line Python monolith crashed under 400 concurrent users on a Tuesday morning. Lucas and Luna walk through the real root cause: a single mutable default argument in a request handler that silently corrupted session state for hours before cascading into a full database connection pool exhaustion. They trace the bug from stack trace to fix, compare how Rust and Go would have c...

In this episode of The Programming Languages Podcast with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna explore why SQLite—a tiny, embedded database engine—is the most deployed database on the planet. They trace its origins with D. Richard Hipp back in 2000, unpack how it powers everything from smartphones to airplanes to web browsers, and discuss the surprising trade-offs that make it a go-to choice for millions of de...

In this episode of The Programming Languages Podcast, Lucas and Luna explore why Kotlin has become the dominant language for Android development. They trace its rise from a niche JVM language to Google's preferred choice, citing concrete numbers: 85% of the top 10,000 Android apps now use Kotlin, and the language's adoption is growing 30% year over year. They discuss how JetBrains designed Kotlin...

Lucas and Luna explore why Zig is gaining traction as a simpler alternative to Rust for systems programming. They break down Zig's compile-time execution model, its approach to memory safety without a borrow checker, and why startups like TigerBeetle and Uber are experimenting with it. The conversation covers a specific benchmark where Zig outperformed Rust in a financial database workload, and wh...

Episode 5 of The Programming Languages Podcast shifts focus to Go — the language Google built for scale. Lucas and Luna break down why Go, not Rust or Python, dominates cloud-native infrastructure in 2026. They trace Go's rise from Docker and Kubernetes to the CNCF ecosystem, crunch concrete adoption numbers: 82 percent of all cloud-native projects on GitHub are written in Go. Luna pushes back on...