3 ms·

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

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

JamesSwift 1mo ago
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.
- OtomotO 1mo ago
  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 enterprise. But low level optimizations are not interesting to these customers at all, even though they could help them with some problems.
  - hirvi74 1mo ago
    > 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.
    - yoyohello13 1mo ago
      It’s not a coincidence that Casey and other high profile performance minded people are in game dev. Thats a field where performance is important (or at least a consideration). In web dev or regular enterprise app dev it’s simply not a consideration that needs to be made most of the time.
- Almondsetat 1mo ago
  How is this relevant? I didn't say he should make a book about his teachings about SWE, I said he could compile a comprehensive review of the foundational literature of compsci
  - shimman 1mo ago
    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.
    - Almondsetat 1mo ago
      Where have I said I want his lived memories?
      - isbvhodnvemrwvn 1mo ago
        When you immediately dismissed his narrow focus.
layla5alive 1mo ago
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..
- Almondsetat 1mo ago
  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
  - bob1029 1mo ago
    > 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.
    - Almondsetat 1mo ago
      You are making many assumptions. First of all, he is doing the deep dives by researching all those articles, and of course the resulting presentation will be very superficial. The point is exactly to publish a book to allow the reader to partake in the deep dive. Secondly, nobody said anything about applying that stuff to your daily work.
      - jddndnfnfn 1mo ago
        [flagged]
        1mo ago
kloop 1mo ago
I'd put Kevlin Henney up there with him. His talk on 1968 alone is pretty amazing
PeterStuer 1mo ago
He's entertaining and well spoken. Love it. Not sure the book medium would be the best avenue. My own sweet spot is presentations, live interviews and meetings. I can't write for sh*t, even if I tried. I know.
spawrks 1mo ago
I feel like the comments that are giving you pushback haven't actually listened to Casey before. I agree with you, while opinionated his perspective is very pragmatic and misunderstood. He's done such a great job giving his experience out to the broader world too.
nextaccountic 1mo ago
The trouble is, his knowledge covers just a slice of it. He won't talk about stuff like functional programming for instance
- Jach 1mo ago
  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 personally experienced in large tracts of SWE culture as others. Others have worked a far larger variety of jobs in the software industry and thus tend to have a broader idea of the cultures and how they've evolved. In a recent clip I saw of him and others discussing how BS are various phrases engineers say (the root of all evil phrase being one of them), he hadn't heard of the YAGNI acronym/idea before. That's no fault on him, programmers live in different worlds. But regardless of one's feelings about such ideas, or whether they've heard of them or not, a history of SWE would have to cover them and the schools of thought that originated them. And this is just one minor thing in living memory and recent careers, there is so much from before he was born that has to be researched and if possible also talked about with the older practitioners who are still around and remember things. If you don't already have some awareness of things that should be covered in a history, whether from personal experience or just general curiosity about history that has led you to see such things before somewhere, the only hope is further research uncovering them, and I don't trust his researching that much. Reading The Psychology of Computer Programming from the 70s was such an interesting read for me from a historical perspective as well as being able to see how some ideas they were thinking about back then came to fruition in some way or another. (e.g. Stack Overflow.) It's just one small part of history. A "complete" history as the top comment suggests would be better as a multi-author endeavor, would probably need many books, and that's if it could be done at all. In the meantime at least one can always go read primary sources and develop an idea of the history on one's own.
  - josephg 1mo ago
CogDisco 1mo ago
Possibly good at starting such a series, then kinda fizzle out.
DanielHB 1mo ago
It is kinda funny that some world-renowed people who invented genius algorithms like quicksort and graph shortest-path were mulling over "hey would be nice if we kept related data together in a struct" and some people were raging over it saying "why you want to change how I work?" Casey points out that many of the lessons they came to were so obvious that it just became how it is done that no one even remembers it was done in any other way. In the talk the laments it makes it really hard to track down who originally came up with these ideas.

JamesSwift 1mo ago

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.

OtomotO 1mo ago
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 enterprise. But low level optimizations are not interesting to these customers at all, even though they could help them with some problems.
- hirvi74 1mo ago
  > 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.
  - yoyohello13 1mo ago
    It’s not a coincidence that Casey and other high profile performance minded people are in game dev. Thats a field where performance is important (or at least a consideration). In web dev or regular enterprise app dev it’s simply not a consideration that needs to be made most of the time.
Almondsetat 1mo ago
How is this relevant? I didn't say he should make a book about his teachings about SWE, I said he could compile a comprehensive review of the foundational literature of compsci
- shimman 1mo ago
  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.
  - Almondsetat 1mo ago
    Where have I said I want his lived memories?
    - isbvhodnvemrwvn 1mo ago
      When you immediately dismissed his narrow focus.

layla5alive 1mo ago

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..

Almondsetat 1mo ago
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
- bob1029 1mo ago
  > 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.
  - Almondsetat 1mo ago
    You are making many assumptions. First of all, he is doing the deep dives by researching all those articles, and of course the resulting presentation will be very superficial. The point is exactly to publish a book to allow the reader to partake in the deep dive. Secondly, nobody said anything about applying that stuff to your daily work.
    - jddndnfnfn 1mo ago
      [flagged]
      - 1mo ago

kloop 1mo ago

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

PeterStuer 1mo ago

He's entertaining and well spoken. Love it. Not sure the book medium would be the best avenue. My own sweet spot is presentations, live interviews and meetings. I can't write for sh*t, even if I tried. I know.

spawrks 1mo ago

I feel like the comments that are giving you pushback haven't actually listened to Casey before. I agree with you, while opinionated his perspective is very pragmatic and misunderstood. He's done such a great job giving his experience out to the broader world too.

nextaccountic 1mo ago

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

Jach 1mo ago
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 personally experienced in large tracts of SWE culture as others. Others have worked a far larger variety of jobs in the software industry and thus tend to have a broader idea of the cultures and how they've evolved. In a recent clip I saw of him and others discussing how BS are various phrases engineers say (the root of all evil phrase being one of them), he hadn't heard of the YAGNI acronym/idea before. That's no fault on him, programmers live in different worlds. But regardless of one's feelings about such ideas, or whether they've heard of them or not, a history of SWE would have to cover them and the schools of thought that originated them. And this is just one minor thing in living memory and recent careers, there is so much from before he was born that has to be researched and if possible also talked about with the older practitioners who are still around and remember things. If you don't already have some awareness of things that should be covered in a history, whether from personal experience or just general curiosity about history that has led you to see such things before somewhere, the only hope is further research uncovering them, and I don't trust his researching that much. Reading The Psychology of Computer Programming from the 70s was such an interesting read for me from a historical perspective as well as being able to see how some ideas they were thinking about back then came to fruition in some way or another. (e.g. Stack Overflow.) It's just one small part of history. A "complete" history as the top comment suggests would be better as a multi-author endeavor, would probably need many books, and that's if it could be done at all. In the meantime at least one can always go read primary sources and develop an idea of the history on one's own.
- josephg 1mo ago

CogDisco 1mo ago

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

DanielHB 1mo ago

It is kinda funny that some world-renowed people who invented genius algorithms like quicksort and graph shortest-path were mulling over "hey would be nice if we kept related data together in a struct" and some people were raging over it saying "why you want to change how I work?" Casey points out that many of the lessons they came to were so obvious that it just became how it is done that no one even remembers it was done in any other way. In the talk the laments it makes it really hard to track down who originally came up with these ideas.