Stanford Seminar - Google's Steve Yegge on GROK

Stanford Online3 HN recommenders · 2013–2024
30K views · talk · evergreen · Uploaded 2012-10-24

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.

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11 comments from Hacker News

@michaelwww2013 · in “Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?”

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) [VIDEO]

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@shadowmatter2013 · in “The Woman at the Heart of Everything Google Builds”

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 Everything that superseded the "gconfig" days was pretty amazing, and IIRC the team behind it in NY did quite well for themselves.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: [VIDEO]

@bodski2013 · in “Cello: Higher level programming in C”

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] [VIDEO] HN discussion: [LINK]

@michaelwww2013 · in “Ask HN: What happened to Steve Yegge after 'quitting'”

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 [VIDEO]

@bodski2014 · in “Nitra, JetBrains’ research project for language tooling, goes open-source”

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] [VIDEO]

@tree_of_item2014 · in “Building Sourcegraph, a large-scale code search engine in Go”

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] [VIDEO]

@michaelwww2015 · in “Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place”

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] [VIDEO]

@_asummers2016 · in “Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository”

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. [VIDEO]

@SwellJoe2016 · in “Software Heritage”

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: [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.

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@dunk0102018 · in “Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?”

Steve Yegge talking about the system he built at Google, called Grok: [VIDEO] . If we have anything half that good in the wider programming community in twenty years time, I will be very surprised.

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@dunk0102024 · in “The Second Golden Age of Emacs”

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: [VIDEO] . So it’s, like, not an accident that emacs can leverage this :-D. Though I never see anyone giving him credit.

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