Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time with Elixir, which is based on the Erlang virtual machine. My work on High Frequency Trading in the 2000’s was influenced heavily by my study of Erlang at that time. While Erlang was simply way too slow to handle the microsecond level performance we needed (C/C++ was the only choice at the time), nonetheless the approach of using message-passing concurrency, which I learned to love from “Programming Erlang” by Joe Armstrong, was one important key to our success.
The Rust programming language. Sometimes you need CPU performance. Rust is the first language to achieve the performance of C / C++ without the attendant memory safety issues. Adoption of Rust in systems programming (and embedded!) would have a major positive effect on information security. And it’s starting to happen. By the way I’m not very good at writing Rust code. Still fighting with the borrow checker.
Almost anything by Fabrice Bellard. The TCC Tiny C Compiler, Qemu, Libbf, QuickJS. He makes small things that are incredibly powerful.
Apache Arrow — Wes McKinney, creator of Pandas is leading a project to create standard API’s for in-memory storage, transport, and processing of column-oriented data. Combine this with Optane and I think you can begin to see the future.
Adafruit. I’m becoming an Adafruit junky. The ecosystem for embedded computing is blowing open — and you can program a $5 microcontroller in CircuitPython. I think the ease and low cost with which anyone with a small amount of programming experience can become a “maker” of cool automated real-world tech will lead to a revolution in embedded devices similar to the way Open Source caused a revolution in the 90’s-2000’s. Someone tell Lady Ada I am a big fan.