Talks to Watch

Stanford Seminar - Google's Steve Yegge on GROK

30K views · Oct 24, 2012 · 1:20:29 · 3 HN recommenders · 11 mentions · discussed 2013–2024

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.

Why Hacker News points people here: HN refers to it as the main public description of Google's internal code analysis tooling, and as a precursor of ideas like LSP.

“this talk by Steve Yegge was both entertaining and informative”HN comment, 2013

What Hacker News said 11

Strongly recommendsdunk010Oct 2018

“If we have anything half that good in the wider programming community in twenty years time, I will be very surprised.”

Yegge describes the Grok system he built at Google.

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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.

in “Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?” · view on HN
RecommendsmichaelwwwApr 2013

“this talk by Steve Yegge was both entertaining and informative”

Entertaining, informative talk on large-scale source code analysis.

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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

in “Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?” · view on HN
RecommendsSwellJoeJul 2016

“The internal beast sounds kind of awesome.”

Talk on Google's internal code search and code comprehension.

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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.

Recommendsdunk010Feb 2024

“He has a great talk on it”

Yegge's talk on Grok, precursor of LSP.

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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.

in “The Second Golden Age of Emacs” · view on HN
Cites itshadowmatterJul 2013

“Steve Yegge wrote GROK, which is an internal tool”

Steve Yegge's talk on GROK, an internal Google tool.

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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

in “The Woman at the Heart of Everything Google Builds” · view on HN
Cites itbodskiJul 2013

“Steve Yegge at Google is/was involved in a project called 'Grok'”

Yegge's Grok project at Google resembles the discussed project.

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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

in “Cello: Higher level programming in C” · view on HN
Cites itmichaelwwwJul 2013

“He actually has been working on a big data analysis problem for the last four years”

Shows Yegge working on big data analysis at Google.

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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

in “Ask HN: What happened to Steve Yegge after 'quitting'” · view on HN
Cites itbodskiMay 2014

“This looks very much in the spirit of Yegges' 'Grok' project at Google”

Yegge's Grok project at Google as comparable work.

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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

in “Nitra, JetBrains’ research project for language tooling, goes open-source” · view on HN
Cites ittree_of_itemJul 2014

Source for Yegge's Grok project at Google.

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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

in “Building Sourcegraph, a large-scale code search engine in Go” · view on HN
Cites itmichaelwwwSep 2015

“Steve Yegge, from Google, talks about the GROK Project - Large-Scale, Cross-Language source analysis.”

Talk on GROK, large-scale cross-language source analysis.

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For those interested, the source analyzer Steve Yegge was working on called GROK has been renamed Kythe. I don't know how useful it turned out to be for those 2B LOC. link Steve Yegge, from Google, talks about the GROK Project - Large-Scale, Cross-Language source analysis. [2012] this video

in “Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place” · view on HN
Cites it_asummersJun 2016

“Steve Yegge has spoken about the search tool his team built”

Yegge's team's search tool for refactoring across Google.

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Steve Yegge has spoken about the search tool his team built to solve the "has someone else written this?" and "refactor this" for all the languages and systems across Google. this video

in “Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository” · view on HN