alt Hacker NewsPersonally I'm quite sure this is super interesting, but I don't really have 3 hours to listen to this, even 1.5h at 2x speed is too much.
I would very much prefer something written down, so I could absorb this at my own pace. I know, gift horse, but still.
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It's worth the listen if you're even mildly interested in the history of computer science. He's a great presenter. I guess at some point you do have to prioritize how to spend your time, though.
It is quite long, but I thought it was worth it if you can find the time. Short of that I think just reading the Knuth article the quote is from might bring similar insights.
Maybe go for a long drive? Long walk? Whatever floats your boat.
I used to do manual labor and I would work my way through like eight hours of audiobooks per day.
If you want a spoilery TLDR: It's more about the journey. He tracks down the origin, finds the support, finds the support flawed, and leaves you to your own conclusion rather than make a new flawed one.
The basic idea is that the origin assumes a highly critical inner hot loop, don't assume where it is, and optimize there.
There's some other time spent saying this justifies slower abstractions for maintainability elsewhere.
This is one talk that is worth the 3 hours (the talk is 2 hours, plus a qa with none other than Ginger Bill of Odin fame)!
The last hour is a Q&A. I don't know if that changes your perception of how watchable it is.
It's also a little fluffy. It's basically the history of how the book Structured Programming came about, because it's that book that essentially caused Knuth to write an article that contained the quote.
A lot of it is fairly interesting but it also highlights a big problem I do have with Muratori. He generalizes from self. He didn't fully understand or appreciate the quote about premature optimization, so no one did. And even though he's been told what it actually means, and was probably pointed to the full quote, he would stick on his interpretation. It's likely someone he views as "higher", like Jon Blow, challenged him and then he took the time to actually look at it.
There is a 45 min version at Primeagen's "The Standup"
Audio transcription has been around for a while, you could solve this problem for yourself quite easily.
I asked my clanker to summarize it for me:
It’s on YouTube, pull the transcript and format it with an LLM. If there’s no transcript, there’s Whisper. All of this can be done with local models too.
Thanks to modern playback technology, you can pause it and resume play later at your convenience.