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Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

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Re: Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

#21

Post by abainbridge »

knollimar wrote: post #10
torginus wrote: post #9

Personally I'm quite sure this is super interesting, but I don't really have 3 hours to listen to this, even 1.5h at 2x speed is too much. I would very much prefer something written down, so I could absorb this at my own pace. I know, gift horse, but still.

If you want a spoilery TLDR: It's more about the journey. He tracks down the origin, finds the support, finds the support flawed, and leaves you to your own conclusion rather than make a new flawed one. The basic idea is that the origin assumes a highly critical inner hot loop, don't assume where it is, and optimize there. There's some other time spent saying this justifies slower abstractions for maintainability els…

Another point I liked was that there was, apparently, an influential book called Structured Programming, whose content was so universally agreed upon, that all programming became Structured Programming. Nobody needs the book anymore.

Re: Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

#22

Post by FacelessJim »

Terrific presentation. But I have a comment:

His dismissal of the argument Knuth makes regarding the hot loops could have been explored a bit better. I found it weird he didn’t mention the difference of types of programs of then vs now. Even today, in scientific code it is still absolutely the case a lot of the time that a huge chunk of the runtime comes from a single very very hot loop. It might be hidden in a library, but it’s there. Instead he focuses only on “program size”. Knuth samples where very small FORTRAN programs (compared to today’s standards). Today’s program are bigger but the fundamental number crunching primitive of “let’s compute stuff in a loop” remains. It’s just buried under a pile of extra cruft (data loading, parallelism, dispatching etc).

Now we just deal with a lot more programs that are of a whole different class compared to what they where doing with computers in the 70s. We have much more I/O involved. And hot loops don’t like being I/O bound.

Re: Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

#24

Post by wpm »

torginus wrote: post #9

Personally I'm quite sure this is super interesting, but I don't really have 3 hours to listen to this, even 1.5h at 2x speed is too much. I would very much prefer something written down, so I could absorb this at my own pace. I know, gift horse, but still.

Audio transcription has been around for a while, you could solve this problem for yourself quite easily.

Re: Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

#26

Post by mrkeen »

abainbridge wrote: post #21
knollimar wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want a spoilery TLDR: It's more about the journey. He tracks down the origin, finds the support, finds the support flawed, and leaves you to your own conclusion rather than make a new flawed one. The basic idea is that the origin assumes a highly critical inner hot loop, don't assume where it is, and optimize there. There's some other time spent saying this justifies slower abstractions for maintainability els…

Another point I liked was that there was, apparently, an influential book called Structured Programming, whose content was so universally agreed upon, that all programming became Structured Programming. Nobody needs the book anymore.

Hard to tell if sarcastic, but anyway.

I think the GOTOers just died out.

Some day null, statements (rather than expressions) and side-effects will have always been wrong.

Re: Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

#27

Post by socalgal2 »

tialaramex wrote: post #5

tl;dr the saying is that "premature optimisation is the root of all evil", and Casey burrows into contemporary data to show that really although the claim was 3% of the code takes up 90% of the runtime even then it was more likely 4% takes 50%. The best thing you could take away from this lecture is something a reasonable person should take away from the original "root of all evil" saying anyway. Measure. Measure. Me…

> Measure. Measure. Measure.

The problem is knowing what to measure. There's another saying

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

As an example from memory, there was a game dev company that celebrated they had maxed out the cores on the PS3. That didn't mean anything though, anyone can max out the cores by filing them with bad code. But hey, their "measurement" told them they had maxed out the machine

Re: Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

#28

Post by knollimar »

mrkeen wrote: post #26
abainbridge wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another point I liked was that there was, apparently, an influential book called Structured Programming, whose content was so universally agreed upon, that all programming became Structured Programming. Nobody needs the book anymore.

Hard to tell if sarcastic, but anyway. I think the GOTOers just died out. Some day null, statements (rather than expressions) and side-effects will have always been wrong.

No, they're not sarcastic. It was an interesting point; if an idea succeeds well enough people just do it and make it "common sense". It's a point in the talk.

Re: Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

#29

Post by philippta »

kshallvari wrote: post #13
torginus wrote: post #9

Personally I'm quite sure this is super interesting, but I don't really have 3 hours to listen to this, even 1.5h at 2x speed is too much. I would very much prefer something written down, so I could absorb this at my own pace. I know, gift horse, but still.

There is a 45 min version at Primeagen's "The Standup"

Having watched both, they cover completey different topics.

Re: Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

#30

Post by dundarious »

FacelessJim wrote: post #22

Terrific presentation. But I have a comment: His dismissal of the argument Knuth makes regarding the hot loops could have been explored a bit better. I found it weird he didn’t mention the difference of types of programs of then vs now. Even today, in scientific code it is still absolutely the case a lot of the time that a huge chunk of the runtime comes from a single very very hot loop. It might be hidden in a libra…

He has addressed the "hotspot" notion in the past, one example being part of https://youtu.be/x2EOOJg8FkA
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