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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]

#71

Post by cure_42 »

tialaramex wrote: post #44
mrkeen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not the focus of the talk and so it's hard to tell if Casey understands (the choice to separate the words GO TO in several places suggests he does) but the `goto` keyword you've seen in several modern languages is not the problematic "GO TO statement", it's a de-fanged remnant, the toy poodle to GO TO's wolf pack. The actual GO TO complained of is, like the jump instruction in machine code, just entirely unbothe…

Windows batch, no?

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

#72

Post by wavemode »

Pannoniae wrote: post #49
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…

Being I/O bound is usually a result of bad engineering practices though. If you're I/O bound, that either means the problem doesn't require much computation - which is possible but fairly rare, or more likely that your code is so unoptimised that barely any computation gets carried out while your code is waiting on memory/disk/network. "I can't do anything because my program is I/O-bound" is more of an excuse / menta…

No, I don't think the way you're characterizing this is accurate. I/O is inherently very slow compared to computation. And many programs genuinely don't have any useful computation to do while waiting for I/O - because the result of that I/O operation contains the information needed for the program to even make its next decision.

Such programs are not necessarily impossible to optimize. One common optimization is to use an event loop, allowing just a few threads to handle thousands of concurrent operations. Because while a thread is waiting for I/O in one request or unit of work, in the meantime it moves on to work on processing another request/unit. Another common optimization is batching/grouping of I/O calls.

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

#73

Post by JavierFlores09 »

gessha wrote: post #62
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.

It’s on YouTube, pull the transcript and format it with an LLM. If there’s no transcript, there’s Whisper. All of this can be done with local models too.

Audio transcription is nowhere near the same as a properly written piece of text. Videos are simply a different format, and thus a lot of the communication is held by the fact that there's visual cues to go by. If one were to write an article about the same, you'd use much denser language as well as references/links around the topic. Maybe even restructure the whole thing to communicate it better through text.

It is something you can maybe whip up with the help of an LLM but then you're left wondering whether it is actually communicating what the video intended to begin with, as you wouldn't be as knowledgeable about the topic, one wouldn't be able to spot the parts where an LLM interpreted something horribly and thus reaching the wrong conclusions.

For all of the above, I do not consider audio transcript to be of any help when one prefers written content. It is useful for translation or people with hearing issues, but both of those receive help of the visual parts to convey the topic.

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

#74

Post by [deleted] »

tialaramex wrote: post #44
mrkeen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not the focus of the talk and so it's hard to tell if Casey understands (the choice to separate the words GO TO in several places suggests he does) but the `goto` keyword you've seen in several modern languages is not the problematic "GO TO statement", it's a de-fanged remnant, the toy poodle to GO TO's wolf pack. The actual GO TO complained of is, like the jump instruction in machine code, just entirely unbothe…

[deleted]

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

#75

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

wavemode wrote: post #72
Pannoniae wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being I/O bound is usually a result of bad engineering practices though. If you're I/O bound, that either means the problem doesn't require much computation - which is possible but fairly rare, or more likely that your code is so unoptimised that barely any computation gets carried out while your code is waiting on memory/disk/network. "I can't do anything because my program is I/O-bound" is more of an excuse / menta…

No, I don't think the way you're characterizing this is accurate. I/O is inherently very slow compared to computation. And many programs genuinely don't have any useful computation to do while waiting for I/O - because the result of that I/O operation contains the information needed for the program to even make its next decision. Such programs are not necessarily impossible to optimize. One common optimization is to…

> I/O is inherently very slow compared to computation

This isn't really true anymore. IO has bad latency, but modern SSD bandwidth is ~5-15GB/s. If your program is IO latency bound and processing less that 5GB/s you aren't IO bound, you aren't hiding your latency well enough.

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

#76

Post by brabel »

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.

This is one talk that is worth the 3 hours (the talk is 2 hours, plus a qa with none other than Ginger Bill of Odin fame)!

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

#77

Post by kloop »

Almondsetat wrote: post #15

I think Casey is currently the most informed person to make a series of books or articles summarizing the history of SW Engineering, all the lessons learned and forgotten, and all the good stuff that was published and still hasn't gained traction in the practice

I'd put Kevlin Henney up there with him. His talk on 1968 alone is pretty amazing

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

#78

Post by bob1029 »

Almondsetat wrote: post #66
layla5alive wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think there aren't other people equally or more qualified? I mean Casey may be the most visible person with those qualifications - but lack of visibility doesn't imply lack of competence, plenty of brilliant people work in the background..

Feel free to point to anyone doing these deep dives that specifically tackle the lost knowledge of the early decades of computer science and the ideas that have not yet come to fruition despite being extremely old

> Feel free to point to anyone doing these deep dives

Most of this kind of content comes off as relevant/topical but mindless entertainment. This is not a "deep dive" of anything that I could practically apply in my daily work. It feels good to think this content might add value and then to subsequently consume it, but it's effectively junk food.

I used to spend a lot of time watching crap like lex and primagen before it became obvious that these kinds of information channels are not meaningfully enriching despite sounding like they should be to a casual observer.

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

#79

Post by hirvi74 »

OtomotO wrote: post #54
JamesSwift wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ehh I love Casey and have learned a ton by watching how he thinks about things in his handmade hero series, but he is fairly narrow minded in his views of dev. Not that theres anything wrong with that, for the kinds of dev he does his approach is very good. But its not generalizable.

Absolutely. Like I agree with most everything he says and I like to optimise my own software, but for my day to day jobs and contracts it's simply not feasible. That level of performance and rigor is not what is demanded nor paid or appreciated. E.g. in Enterprise circles it's still OOP from top to bottom. Mixed with a tad more functional style due to varying adoption of that paradigm in the languages used by enterpr…

> not what is demanded nor paid or appreciated.

I suppose it is a matter of what one works on, but that has been consistent in my career.

I have seen many be rewarded for choosing what I would deem intentional, gross negligence. But hey, those devs get work finished faster, and that's all that matters to the non-technical folks.

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

#80

Post by bena »

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.

The last hour is a Q&A. I don't know if that changes your perception of how watchable it is.

It's also a little fluffy. It's basically the history of how the book Structured Programming came about, because it's that book that essentially caused Knuth to write an article that contained the quote.

A lot of it is fairly interesting but it also highlights a big problem I do have with Muratori. He generalizes from self. He didn't fully understand or appreciate the quote about premature optimization, so no one did. And even though he's been told what it actually means, and was probably pointed to the full quote, he would stick on his interpretation. It's likely someone he views as "higher", like Jon Blow, challenged him and then he took the time to actually look at it.

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