Polyglot Programmer · AI Orchestrator · CTO @ Codermine

Giuseppe Arici

I have been writing software for over twenty years. A cap for every language, a t-shirt for every conference.

Book · 2026

Heroes of code

A journey through the years that shook
programming languages

A single night to walk through the rooms where it all started.

Midnight, an empty file on screen. A programmer looks for the words to tell the story of programming languages. Then a voice behind him: David Bowie. A dream journey begins through the rooms where it all started, from Bletchley Park to MIT, from Zurich to Bell Labs, from Oslo to Silicon Valley, and through the people who invented the way we speak to machines. At dawn the dream ends, the guide dissolves, and only the road remains.

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Language · 2026

The “Heroes” programming language

The book turned into a programming language.

One question stayed with me: how does a language come about today? So I wrote one. It is called “Heroes”, after Bowie’s 1977 album, quotation marks included. It is compiled, it fits in five pages, and it is made for the machines that now write code alongside us.

variant Token
    number
        value: i64
    word
        text: str
    plus
    times
    open
    close

# What a token is called in a message.
function name_of(t: Token) -> str
    return match t
        .number _ => "a number"
        .word _   => "a word"
        .plus     => "`+`"
        .times    => "`*`"
        .open     => "`(`"
        .close    => "`)`"

It comes from the book more than it looks: twenty-one chapters inside the decisions of the people who invented languages leave you with a list of mistakes not to make twice. Hence the rules I set myself: no null, no exceptions, and the whole language in five pages, so that it fits in a prompt with the program still to write.

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About

I caught the tail end of COBOL, started out in Java, passed through C# and the Microsoft world, until Rails made me jump to Unix. From there Linux, the Mac, the iPhone: for years mobile was my line of work. Then Go came along, the Gopher won me over, and with it microservices, backends and every kind of architecture. These days I also handle DevOps. I code less than I’d like and manage more than I’ll admit, AI agents included.

I’ve done consulting for companies of every stripe and walked away with one conviction: the real problems are almost always organizational, not technological. Which is why I don’t tie myself to a single technology, even though I have my favorites. My heroes are John Backus, Dennis Ritchie and Bob Kahn.

I’m passionate about history in general and the history of computing in particular: a combination that was bound, sooner or later, to spill over into a talk with the barbarians inside. I co-founded #pragma mark, the Italian association that hosts conferences on the Apple ecosystem, and have spoken at events like Pragma Conference and Codemotion. I’m a co-founder and CTO at Codermine.

I had never written a compiler. Then I wrote a book on the history of programming languages and a language came out of it: it is called “Heroes”, after the Bowie album, and today it compiles itself.

Talks

2026

Heroes of code: the human origin of programming languages Upcoming

Pirloverflow, Brescia · September 22, 2026
2026

The barbarian invasions of LLMs in the Empire of Code

Codermine, internal event
2025

Let It Bit: the story of ARPANET

Codermine, internal event

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