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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]

#181

Post by danpalmer »

ButlerianJihad wrote: post #172
danpalmer wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setting aside incentives – because I think that's very fair to push back on, we should strive for better craft... I find Blow in particular a bit naive when it comes to the complexity of modern non-game software. Games are very complex, but Blow puts them on a pedestal separate from other software, as if a web backend can't be as complex. He calls software slow while simultaneously ignoring most of the functionality.…

Heh heh heh. In actuality, Jon Blow has plenty of experience with distributed and multi-user systems. I worked closely with him while we were developing TinyMUCK 2.x, and the MUF programming language, a stack-based, simplified Forth. In fact, Jon played a crucial role in the invention of the first MUF worm. We had just finished an extension to MUF that permitted triggering programs wherever a text string was expected…

Fair enough! That's some good experience and should address some of what I've heard from him, but perhaps he has forgotten.

That said, and this is coming from someone who (sadly) missed the era of computing you're describing, I think there's still a difference between dealing with a 64-256 player multiplayer system, and scaling a server application across dozens? thousands? of machines, across the world.

My limited research suggests that MUDs run almost exclusively on a single machine (?), or even just having a small number in one location drastically simplifies the problem space.

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

#182

Post by Jach »

josephg wrote: post #174
Jach wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my objection as well. His talk last year on OOP was heavily focused purely on the style of OOP that led to C++'s version. It completely ignored everything else going on outside that historical thread. As history it was interesting but doesn't inform much outside of a C++ view of the world and it missed so much relevant history about OOP more generally. While I suspect he could do research, he also just isn't…

If you know this stuff, please make videos / talks yourself going through it. Casey doesn’t have the background for a lot of this. He’s doing great as a C++ dev but as you say, he’s just one guy with one perspective.

I really think videos and talks are the least effective ways to get these things out there. I'd rather just point people to references I've read myself about specific topics rather than try to create a structured synthesis or presentation. I tend to think that's sort of best anyway for a curious individual: go read primary sources about some topic, and if interested further, citations or other related works. Every Turing Award Lecture transcription I've read has been insightful. I just recalled that Uncle Bob was writing a book about influential programmers, he was calling for suggestions on names a few years ago: https://x.com/unclebobmartin/status/1714972421269119190 One could just read through those names and the names of those the comments added (I had several more) and the work they are most known for, and by the time one is done with that, one will have a very nice historical picture of computer science up to the 70s. Nowhere near complete, of course. It seems he did publish his book at the end of 2024 (https://www.amazon.com/We-Programmers-Chronicle-Coders-Rober...), I'll have to check it out at some point. (Edit: and I'm reminded of another funny thing. Early in the book Clean Code, he asked some other programmers what they thought was meant by the idea. I remember penciling in some objections in the margins that he should have asked x,y,z other people who I would rather have read from than some of his sample.)

It's just absurd to me to point at Casey, of all people, as the most informed person who would be best positioned to publish something containing all of the history of anything broad.

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

#183

Post by [deleted] »

josephg wrote: post #173
nextaccountic wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble is, his knowledge covers just a slice of it. He won't talk about stuff like functional programming for instance

Yeah. Casey is just some guy who’s good at software and YouTube. I’ve worked with dozens of people at his level technically. But very few with his interest and skill at making videos. It’s a pity there’s not more people like him. I’ve met some incredibly smart people in the FP world. I wish more of them made approachable YouTube videos explaining what they know. I recently learned about “Safe Haskell” which, if adapt…

[deleted]

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

#184

Post by CogDisco »

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

Possibly good at starting such a series, then kinda fizzle out.

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

#186

Post by ranger_danger »

ntstatusquo wrote: post #106
bsoles wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I like to watch Casey, Prime, etc. on YouTube, they are not going to teach anybody anything. They are just entertainment for software people with a certain viewpoint.

My one data point is that Casey’s handmade hero series, and his immediate mode gui video from way back in 2005, are what introduced me and some friends to an entirely new way to build graphical user interfaces, and I do feel a great appreciation for that. Guys like Ryan Fleury (of RadDbg) and Vjekoslav Krajacic of Filepilot similarly credit Casey with their “radicalization” :) To your point though, it was less about…

That series also produced this gem:

> Open source is the very worst thing currently going on because it is so incredibly exploitative, it's far more exploitative than any actual company is of the workers who work at the company.

> Even the people who are getting paid in open source are getting massively underpaid to do it compared to how much the people who are using their code are making, it's nothing compared to the power that is accreted by the people who have co-opted that work thanks to the open source model. And then mark zuckerberg gets to define how the internet works despite having paid for almost none of the software that his company actually needed to make that work.

> It's like feudalism or serfdom, these people did the work and got nothing for it. It's like you took the worst aspects of capitalism for workers and the worst aspects of socialism for workers and put them together, that's open source. You get no power and you get no money.

> It's exploitative whether the people chose to be exploited, just because someone chooses to let you exploit them does not mean that you didn't exploit them. And for the record that's how most exploitation works; convincing people to do something that turns out to be very bad for them and very good for you, and that's exactly what the open source movement has turned out to be.

> I really don't see the "we post stuff on github under a gpl2 or lgpl or apache or mit license", all that is to me now is just exploitation. You can say that there's solutions but until someone demonstrates that those solutions work, it's the standard "real communism has never been tried" argument. AGPL is the only thing that I've seen so far that's an attempt to fix these fundamentally unfair compensation practices.

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

#187

Post by ranger_danger »

HexDecOctBin wrote: post #92
bob1029 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 befor…

> that I could practically apply in my daily work When has History of any kind ever held practical value?

When people use it to prevent repeating the same mistakes.

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

#188

Post by HexDecOctBin »

ranger_danger wrote: post #187
HexDecOctBin wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that I could practically apply in my daily work When has History of any kind ever held practical value?

When people use it to prevent repeating the same mistakes.

History wouldn't keep repeating if they did so.

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

#189

Post by isbvhodnvemrwvn »

Almondsetat wrote: post #60
shimman wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the comment was about the history of SWE, if you want a comprehensive history you don't focus on the lived memory of one single individual.

Where have I said I want his lived memories?

When you immediately dismissed his narrow focus.

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

#190

Post by mariusor »

HexDecOctBin wrote: post #188
ranger_danger wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people use it to prevent repeating the same mistakes.

History wouldn't keep repeating if they did so.

Do you know the meme with the airplane with holes in its fuselage? Think of that, please.
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