Stanford Seminar - Google's Steve Yegge on GROK
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN refers to it as the main public description of Google's internal code analysis tooling, and as a precursor of ideas like LSP.
What it is
Steve Yegge's Stanford seminar on GROK, Google's internal large-scale, cross-language source code analysis system. It covers how the system helps with code search and understanding across Google's huge codebase.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2013 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec dunk010 · 2018-10 · on “Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?”
Steve Yegge talking about the system he built at Google, called Grok: [this video] . If we have anything half that good in the wider programming community in twenty years time, I will be very surprised.
Recommends michaelwww · 2013-04 · on “Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?”
I wouldn't want to use the term "best" because there are so many good ones in various areas, but this talk by Steve Yegge was both entertaining and informative. Stanford Seminar - Google's Steve Yegge on GROK (large scale source code analysis) [this video]
Recommends SwellJoe · 2016-07 · on “Software Heritage”
Yes, and they've open sourced part of that here (at least, I think it is related, and is also called "Code Search"): [LINK] But, their public code search was not the same as the internal thing, as far as I know. The internal beast sounds kind of awesome. Here's his talk about it from a few years ago: [this video] I think the really useful thing (beyond a mere search engine that has indexed a lot of source code) is the comprehension of the "guzzintas" and "guzzouttas" of the code, more than merely a naive word search; i.e. knowing how pieces interact, so you can search for functions that work with a particular kind of object, for example, or objects that have the same properties, or code that inte
Recommends dunk010 · 2024-02 · on “The Second Golden Age of Emacs”
LSP is basically an open(-ish) source implementation of Google’s internal tool called Grok. Grok was made by Steve Yegge, a formerly famous tech blogger. Steve Yegge uses emacs, and half his motivation was to equalise editors by moving the language processing elements to an external place that’s shareable by all. He has a great talk on it: [this video] . So it’s, like, not an accident that emacs can leverage this :-D. Though I never see anyone giving him credit.
Cites shadowmatter · 2013-07 · on “The Woman at the Heart of Everything Google Builds”
As another year ex-Googler, I'd say this is BS. Everything that superseded the "gconfig" days was pretty amazing, and IIRC the team behind it in NY did quite well for themselves. Steve Yegge wrote GROK, which is an internal tool, and I'm pretty sure no one around here looks down on him: [this video]
Cites bodski · 2013-07 · on “Cello: Higher level programming in C”
Steve Yegge at Google is/was involved in a project called 'Grok' which sounds pretty similar to that. I really hope it catches on also. [LINK] [this video] HN discussion: [LINK]
Cites michaelwww · 2013-07 · on “Ask HN: What happened to Steve Yegge after 'quitting'”
He actually has been working on a big data analysis problem for the last four years, which is presumably why he was asked to speak, so your characterization of him as all talk and no action is incorrect [this video]
Cites bodski · 2014-05 · on “Nitra, JetBrains’ research project for language tooling, goes open-source”
This looks very much in the spirit of Yegges' 'Grok' project at Google [1][2]. Does anyone know if that project is still alive? [1] [LINK] [2] [this video]