Stanford Online
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 9 months, 2013–2024
1:20:29 · 30K views · Oct 24, 2012
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.
HN refers to it as the main public description of Google's internal code analysis tooling, and as a precursor of ideas like LSP.
11 comments from Hacker News
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.
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 interacts with the same API you're working with, whatever.
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.
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
This looks very nice; automated access to and analysis of the huge amounts of source code on the Internet could be a game changer for programmers everywhere. As an aside, when I saw Google in the URL I thought that this was a rebranding of Steve Yegge's "Grok"[0] project. Does anyone know what's happened to that? [0] this video