Please put a direct link to it.
Required:
(please, native english speaker, edit my question)
I like Guy Steele's Growing a Language. I find it thought-provoking on a number of levels -- not least of which is that I get to know what a computer feels like while it is being programmed by a master :)
Doug Engelbart: The Demo
Doug Engelbart giving the "mother of all Demos" 1968
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8734787622017763097
Doug's 1968 Demo - web page with links to various versions and archived various at sites, from Douglas Engelbart's web site.
It's unbelievable what was invented back then!
Steve Jobs' commencement speech at Stanford, 2005
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA
3 stories...
I like Balmer's speech Developer developer developers... and on and on.. Simply because it is entusiastic. How many people we know who love thier jobs so passionaltely.
This speech is my current favorite. It's Why the Lucky Stiff's talk at the Art && Code Symposium discussing the problems with the way we currently teach programming. I will admit it might not be the best or most inspiring speech on the list, but I believe the story of _why brings it to another level.
50 in 50 by Guy L. Steele, Jr. and Richard "Dick" P. Gabriel. If you have seen either Dick Gabriel or Guy Steele speak, you might think you can imagine what an experience this is going to be. You're wrong.
Describing it as "Live Multimedia Performance Art Poetry Slam" doesn't even come close to doing it justice.
The topic of this "talk" is to celebrate 50 historically important, relevant, interesting, strange, curious and sometimes just plain silly programming languages in 50 words each.
Integration Tests are a scam made me realize how unit tests are supposed to be written.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQVTIJBZook
JavaScript: The Good Parts by Doug Crockford
JavaScript is a language with more than its share of bad parts. It went from non-existence to global adoption in an alarmingly short period of time. It never had an interval in the lab when it could be tried out and polished. JavaScript has some extraordinarily good parts. In JavaScript there is a beautiful, highly expressive language that is buried under a steaming pile of good intentions and blunders. The best nature of JavaScript was so effectively hidden that for many years the prevailing opinion of JavaScript was that it was an unsightly, incompetent abomination. This session will expose the goodness in JavaScript, an outstanding dynamic programming language. Within the language is an elegant subset that is vastly superior to the language as a whole, being more reliable, readable and maintainable.
The Principles of Agile Design: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/principles-agile-oo-design
Pretty much hits the nail on the head as to why your code becomes unmanegable as time goes by, and what can be done about it.
Rich Hickey's Clojure presentation at the JVM Languages Summit 2008 led me to try it out: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/hickey-clojure
Steve Yegge's talk at OSCON 2007: How to Ignore Marketing and Become Irrelevant in Two Easy Steps.
This talk is inspiring because he did the whole thing with broken PowerPoint slides. The focus of the talk should be on the speaker, not the slides, and the lack of slides did not detract from his talk at all.
“Humanity: Epic FAIL” – Jon Skeet at Stack Overflow Dev Days London was a speech I found pretty inspiring. As the speech shows how computers can have problems with speech, numbers and time, it gave me hope for the future that we may yet beat some of these challenges. There is a fair bit of humor in the speech which may or may not help those watching it.
"The Joys of the Craft" by Frederick P. Brooks Jr in "The Mythical Man Month". Doesn't quite fit your requirement of being a speech - but for me it is still the one essay that perfectly captures the soul of programming.
