(2011-07-27) Yegge Oscon Talk

Steve Yegge spoke at OsCon-Data.

Considers Social Networking sites to be trivial: "ultimately about sharing cat pictures" (NPC). Clearly slagging Google Plus. Says he had signed up to join that project, and he's now quitting that project in public. (Meaningful Life)

"All the hard problems require (some) math and statistics."

The Human Genome Project is a worthy project.

He challenges OReilly to publish books on math, stats for programmers. Hey, they already did! BioInformatics (NBIC), etc.

More from Steve afterwards. Now, as it happens, I am in fact working on a very cool project at Google. It's not important in the same sense that curing cancer or getting clean water to impoverished cities are important. But it's a project that has the potential to revolutionize software development, and NOT through some new goddamn dependency-injection framework or Web App Framework or other godawful embarrassing hacky workaround for a deficient programming language. No. It is a project that aims to turn Source Code -- ALL source code -- from PlainText into Wikipedia. I've been on it for three and a half years, and I came up with the idea, and the team running with the idea is fantastic. The work may not be directly important, but it is an enabler for important work, much like scaling infrastructure is an enabler.

• update: this is the Grok Project. Grok isn't easily / directly open-sourceable. Our indexes and protocols are all internal formats. We also rely heavily on Google's internal build system. The long-term goal is be an external platform and with open standards.