{
  "id": 16436603,
  "title": "Michal Wallace on Narrative Programming: Why Learn J when LLMs Code?",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/25/michal-wallace-on-narrative-programming-why-learn-j-when-llms-code",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-10-25T05:04:57.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Lobsters",
    "slug": "lobsters",
    "url": "https://alexalejandre.com/interviews/michal-wallace/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Michal Wallace, known as tangentstorm, is deeply passionate about programming pedagogy, creating instructional videos for J and Decker. His dream course involves starting with a b4 (a Forth-like virtual machine) or even abstract concepts like bits and thinking about them, then progressing to little Lisp and/or Forth, a Pascal-like language, and eventually Implish. He made several J videos due to J's uniqueness and the limited number of people creating content for it, as well as his desire to teach his daughter. Wallace works with K at 1010data, which was later acquired by Symphony AI, where he now uses Python and JavaScript to create tools for the company's API. He believes that big systems across different programming paradigms are quite similar, with only a few unique components that matter. He prefers having a variety of small mini-languages with the same runtime, allowing for flexibility in personal programming and exploration.",
  "summary": null,
  "key_points": [
    "Michal Wallace, known as tangentstorm, is passionate about programming pedagogy.",
    "He created instructional videos for J and Decker programming languages.",
    "Wallace advocates for multiple small mini-languages with unified runtime for flexibility."
  ],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}