Ryan welcomes Jeffrey van Gogh, Director of Engineering, Android Developer Experience, at Google and board member of the Kotlin Foundation. They discuss the evolution of the Kotlin language from JVM to multiplatform, how their governance board works with the community to stop breaking changes, and the intricacies of Kotlin’s multiplatform capabilities beyond just Android.

Ryan welcomes Paul Everitt, developer advocate at JetBrains and an early adopter of Python, to discuss the history, growth, and future of Python. They cover Python’s pivotal moments and rise alongside the internet, the increased adoption from transitions like Python 2 to Python 3, and the significant role Python plays in academia and data science today.

Ryan and Eira welcome Erin Yepis, Senior Analyst at Stack Overflow, to the show to discuss the newly released 2025 Developer Survey results. They explore the decline in trust in AI tools, shifts in popular programming technologies, and the patterns Erin saw in salary growth among developers.

Tillman Elser, AI/ML lead at Sentry, joins Ryan for a conversation about improving error monitoring with AI and ML. They talk through the challenges of analyzing stack traces, the innovative use of embeddings to improve error grouping, the trial-and-error process of developing algorithms, and where Sentry’s AI capabilities are headed next.

Is your preferred programming language a matter of national security?

Computer science deals with concurrency, but what about simultaneity?

On this episode: Al Sweigart is a software developer, developer advocate, and author of ten Python books. He tells Ben and Ryan why he’s such a fan of the language, why it’s a great programming language for beginners, and how it became the default for so many data science and backend AI projects.

Should a language be easy or comprehensive?

Ben and Ryan explore why configuration is so complicated, the right to repair, the best programming languages for beginners, how AI is grading exams in Texas, Automattic’s 125ドルM acquisition of Beeper, and why a major US city’s train system still relies on floppy disks. Plus: The unique challenge of keeping up with a field that’s changing as rapidly as GenAI.

The home team is joined by Michael Foree, Stack Overflow’s director of data science and data platform, and occasional cohost Cassidy Williams, CTO at Contenda, for a conversation about long context windows, retrieval-augmented generation, and how Databricks’ new open LLM could change the game for developers. Plus: How will FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s sentence of 25 years in prison reverberate in the blockchain and crypto spaces?