Casey Muratori: Surprises In Computer History And Where Bad Code Comes From
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What topics are introduced in the episode intro?
The amount of stuff that you learn about what was going on at that time is just mind-boggling.
This is Casey Muratori, video game developer and sometimes computer historian, through his popular talks, and I asked him all about the stories in computing he uncovered. Dykstro was depressed at that time.
He literally says, like, in this period I was very depressed because of these reasons. Look at the correspondence. They didn't have the ability to do like pithy Twitter replies, so it was just on paper.
What drew you towards video gaming
There's a bunch of things I could say about that, but they're probably all BS.
Here's the full episode. There's so much, you know, AI doom content out there. I'm hoping that we can just talk about interesting things in software engineering and just see where it goes. So I'm not gonna ask anything that's uh, you know, all this AI doom, you're gonna you have two years left to be a software engineer. So
fantastic. I will try to keep the AI mentions to a minute.
What surprising discoveries were made while digging into computer history?
There's this famous quote by Donald Knuth. The big part of it is premature optimization is the root of all evil. And I remember I've I've heard that before, but I I don't think I know the full history behind it. And you know, why is that significant?
So I guess we can split that into two parts. Like, what's the history behind it and why is this significant? The significant part is probably the easiest to answer because it's, you know, for whatever accident of history, it's something that people really remembered. Like it's stuck. And so the reason that it ended up being significant is people keep repeating it and they keep interpreting it or reinterpreting it. So the effects of that. That phrase far beyond what anyone may have done with it in context at the time or what they meant, or any of those things, or the history. The effects of it are like still felt to this day. Some people, uh, I think probably correctly you might say, interpret the term with a fair bit of nuance and and say like, oh well, you know, it it can mean a number of different things, or it's trying to capture something subtle or whatever.
Other people are very blunt about it and just think like, oh, it just means I don't have to think about the performance of my code to like the end of the project, right? Like like premature just means any consideration of performance is not worth it. Eventually we'll see where the code is slow and we'll fix it or something, right? And so uh it's it's a significant phrase for that reason, at least to me. You still hear it to this day, and it's at least, you know, depending on how uh you want to account for it, it's at least something that's 50 years old now. Uh and so that's an an incredibly lasting impact for a rule of thumb or however you want to look at it. So uh on the history side, this was really.
really uh when I decided to to to do a talk on this, I knew I wanted to do another computer history talk um because I had given one before at at this this was at something called the Better Software Conference. It's you know, there's been two of them so far. And at the first one I did a history talk and I wanted to do another history talk. And this is gonna be like I'm probably only gonna do two of these and this second one. I wanted to do it on the history of this phrase because when I started looking into the history of this phrase a while back, I found that there was just a lot of stuff there that I didn't know. And this is true, I mean, I guess I would say every time I've ever looked at computer history, every every time I've go, I refer to it as dumpster diving, but it's not, it's not like that makes it sound derogatory.
Uh, I just think, but I think of that as kind of what I'm doing. But it's not really like it's actually a very enjoyable experience uh to go back through history and try to pick pick through what happened. But um so to do this talk, I basically went and tried to do a pretty detailed detailed, you know, analysis of like how did this f phrase end up being put in print?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What topics are introduced in the episode intro?
0:00–1:08
2
What surprising discoveries were made while digging into computer history?
1:08–17:07
3
How did Dijkstra’s personal struggles influence the ‘goto considered harmful’ story?
17:07–35:18
4
What is the 35‑year mistake and how does Sketchpad illustrate it?
35:18–51:41
5
How does the discussion of Clean Code relate to performance trade‑offs?
51:41–1:08:55
6
Where does bad code come from and why are design docs problematic?
1:08:55–1:17:50
7
What is the only unbreakable law in software engineering?
1:17:50–1:40:34
8
What career advice does Casey share for engineers starting out?
1:40:34–1:57:50
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The Peterman Pod
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