ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461

The following is a conversation with Michael Palson, better known online as ThePrimeagen. He is a programmer who has entertained and inspired millions of people to have fun building stuff with software, whether you're a newbie or a seasoned developer who has been battling it out in the software engineering trenches for decades. In short, ThePrimeagen is a legendary programmer and a great human being with an inspiring roller coaster of a life story. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now, dear friends, here's ThePrimeagen. What do you love most about programming? Uh, what brings you joy when you program?

I can tell you the first time that I ever felt love in programming or felt that joy or that excitement-

Sure.

... which was in college. It was the second class in data structures, and the teacher that was teaching, Ray Babcock, he was talking about linked lists. Now, you, you have to learn Java at Montana State University when I went, and so he's off the kind of explaining this whole linked list thing and all that, and then he shows code. And then the code, it's like abstract class node or whatever it was. I can't remember what it was, and then it had a private member, and that private member was of type node. And I've never seen that before. It is a class that is called node with a member that is of itself. And for the first time ever, I was like, "Oh my gosh. Like, there's no end. There's no way to iterate. This is not like a set of 10 items. This is a set of infinite items." And so, like, my mind kind of, like, exploded in that moment. Like, there's actually... You... Like, the what you can express is huge. I can see what memory looks like. Like, I can see this kind of hopping through space, and I just remember being just so blown away 'cause up until that point everything was just, "All right. I have a list of 10 items. I have a list of 20 items," right? It was very rigid and small, and the things I built were really small and trivial. And all of a sudden, I felt like I could build, like, anything in that one moment, and it was so amazing. I just remember sitting in class for what f- I don't even remember how long those classes were anything, but I just remember being just completely, like, profoundly impacted by this notion. And so I just sat there and I watched it, and I had the exact same experience in, heavens forbid, by a software engineering class when we talked about the decorator pattern, where you can keep on constructing these objects in this recursive way. Not that I think that's actually a good idea to do, but just watching that and realizing, like, there's so many weird and unique ways you can solve problems, and, like, you can just... Anything your mind can think of, you can just create that. And I just remember getting just so excited about the possibility that anything is possible.