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
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 elsewhere.
I believe this is referencing a meme on the primeagen's standup podcast, where Casey is referred to as legendary while he feels undeserving of this title.
Titles aside, his talk is really insightful and it is super interesting to do a deep dive on these old computer/programming topics as the modern concepts were being discovered
Hah, I wasn't aware of that. I was sort of referring to what seems to be not such a meme that jblow is always introduced like that. It just seems weird, even if true...
Yeah Ive been meaning to watch that talk - I love listening to pretty much anything Casey says/does. He's extremely thoughtful and fair.
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. Measure. If you aren't measuring that's not optimization it's masturbation.
Ironically in the process of measuring for a third time yesterday I tripped a bug in Bill's language for which I opened an issue. This is not the goal of measuring three times but merely a happy accident.
Along the way Casey discovers (?) that Structured Programming means just what we today call programming†, that software was a lot smaller in the days when 4096 bytes of RAM was a good entry level option and that loads of these famous people from 1970s computer science knew each other.
† And knowing about this is one reason the Structured Concurrency people want that everywhere. Very possibly there's a future where it seems silly that people once wrote programs which did not use structured concurrency.
I would very much prefer something written down, so I could absorb this at my own pace. I know, gift horse, but still.
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 elsewhere.
(to be clear, I'm a big fan of Casey)
Titles aside, his talk is really insightful and it is super interesting to do a deep dive on these old computer/programming topics as the modern concepts were being discovered
Yeah Ive been meaning to watch that talk - I love listening to pretty much anything Casey says/does. He's extremely thoughtful and fair.
Exactly!
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. Measure. If you aren't measuring that's not optimization it's masturbation.
Ironically in the process of measuring for a third time yesterday I tripped a bug in Bill's language for which I opened an issue. This is not the goal of measuring three times but merely a happy accident.
Along the way Casey discovers (?) that Structured Programming means just what we today call programming†, that software was a lot smaller in the days when 4096 bytes of RAM was a good entry level option and that loads of these famous people from 1970s computer science knew each other.
† And knowing about this is one reason the Structured Concurrency people want that everywhere. Very possibly there's a future where it seems silly that people once wrote programs which did not use structured concurrency.