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Monktoberfest 2016: Bryan Cantrill - Oral Tradition in Software Engineering

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  • Recommended by 7 people: 6 on Hacker News and 1 on Lobsters.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2016 to 2026.
  • Presented by Bryan Cantrill, CTO of Joyent
  • An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

41K views9 years ago7 recommendations

Tools and practiceHistory and cultureCode review and teamworkHistory of computingDeveloper productivity

Bryan Cantrill explores how software engineers pass down knowledge through stories, folklore, and code comments, advocating for writing software with future generations in mind.

From ‘Jingle Bells Batman Smells’ to ‘Real Programmers Write in FORTRAN,’ Bryan Cantrill (@bcantrill) dives into how we share our collective knowledge and how we pass wisdom to future generations. He advocates for writing software with future generations in mind.

Why it's here

7 people recommend this

What people say. Highly recommended for its entertaining stories and its powerful argument for writing expressive, historical comments in codebases.

thundergolferon Hacker News • Recommends

On “The Documentation Triangle, or, why code isn't self documenting”

Oral Tradition in Software Engineering1 by Bryan Cantrill really helped me appreciate that long comments in code can be a treasured part of a software space. I started my career in a pretty low-comment Ruby codebase, but now count myself as a person partial to adding lengthy 'why not how' commentary in programs. 1. link to this video
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OmarAssadion Hacker News • Recommends

On “The Story of Mel (1983)”

I’m surprised I haven’t seen this linked yet, but Bryan Cantrill of dtrace, Sun, lawnmower, Joyent, etc, fame gave an amazing talk for Monktoberfest 2016, titled “Oral Tradition in Software Engineering”, which features The Story of Mel 1. Highly recommend checking it out — there are loads of little gems and stories like this throughout. All of his other presentations are great too and definitely worth a listen if you like this sort of thing 2. A couple of my favorites are “Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of Illumos” 3 and “Debugging Under Fire: Keep your Head when Systems have Lost their Mind” 4. 1: link to this video 2: link 3: link 4: link
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lil_cainon Lobsters • Recommends

Monktoberfest 2016: Bryan Cantrill - Oral Tradition in Software Engineering
6View on Lobsters

secstateon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Back in the Day: Unix, Minix and Linux”

I love historical pieces about technology. There's so much new and shiny all the time in tech, it's nice to reflect on where we've been. Makes me want to re-watch Bryan's talk at Monktoberfest a few years ago on oral tradition in tech: link to this video
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thristianon Hacker News • Recommends

On “WhyTheName”

You may be interested in this 2016 talk about oral history in software engineering: link to this video To oversimplify: we should write more interesting and historical comments in our codebases, write more blog posts and give more talks, and share more links to blog posts and talks other people have created.
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jjiceon Hacker News • Recommends

On “XOR”

One of my favorite XOR stories is from Bryan Cantrill (of Oxide, Joyent, and Sun) in this presentation 0 and this video 1. To avoid clicking a link: When he was at Sun, he was chatting with a coworker (Roger Faulkner) about the lack of logical XOR in C. Faulkner said it was because you couldn't short circuit it, and Brian thought that was wild. Then Roger emailed Dennis Ritchie to ask and he confirmed it was what Faulkner had said. That stories gets me every time! First of all, it's very funny and well delivered by Cantrill, but it's also just so incredible that they could ask the man himself. 0 link 1 link to this video
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shagieon Hacker News • Recommends

On “The Jeff Dean Facts”

As I write this, catb is not serving promptly... so link I also recommend Monktoberfest 2016: Bryan Cantrill - Oral Tradition in Software Engineering : link to this video
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Annataron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Building and Linking Libraries in C”

Oh, where is the officially sanctioned definition of the meaning and intent of a header? So glad you asked: The C Programming language, 2nd edition, page 82, chapter "FUNCTIONS AND PROGRAM STRUCTURE", as follows: "There is one more thing to worry about--the definitions and declarations shared among the files. As much as possible, we want to centralize this, so that there is only one copy to get right and keep right as the program evolves. Accordingly, we will place this common material in a header file , calc.h, which will be included as necessary." link to this video
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tephraon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Gordon Moore, Intel Co-Founder, Dies at 94”

This made me immediately think of "The bug count also rises" link and of course Bryan Cantrills reading of it: link to this video
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shagieon Hacker News • Mentions

On “VAXen, my children, just don't belong some places. (1989)”

Thus the importance of the story and why keeping it alive in the "oral" tradition of software engineering. This is of the same golden era of writing as The Story of Mel - A Real Programmer ( link ) which was from '83. Monktoberfest 2016: Bryan Cantrill - Oral Tradition in Software Engineering - link to this video
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gavmoron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently”

I had the rare privilege of pair-programming 40 hours a week for several years early in my career. This follows the extreme programming ethos of "everything in the limit," where pairing is "code review in the limit" and "mentorship in the limit," to say nothing of the oral tradition it imparts0. Even pair-programming with my fellow juniors was both more productive and more educational than a rubber duck1. I had the opportunity to sit down to dinner with some very junior devs at a family gathering, recently, and to hear of their isolation due to remote-work broke my heart. They simply have no idea what they're missing. 0. link to this video 1. link
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shagieon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Dennis Ritchie on the priorities of && || vs. == etc. (1982)”

Aside, In Oral Tradition in Software Engineering by Bryan Cantrill, he talks a bit about the lack of logical xor in C. link to this video
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shagieon Hacker News • Mentions

On “One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)”

…dence?" Was it a "this is the way that bc worked in the 70s because it was easier to write a parser for it?" or was there some more underlying reason for the "this problem gets really icky if unary negation has lower precedence than the binary operators and makes for other expressions that become less reasonable?" It's like the Logical XOR issue ( link to this video ) ... and I'm of the opinion that there's a real reason why this design choice was made. (Aside: Some other historical "why things work that way" touching on dc's place in history: Ken Thompson interviewed by Brian Kernighan at VCF East 2019 link - it goes on to pipes and dc makes an appearance there again)…
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shagieon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Jingle Bells (Batman Smells): an incomplete festive folk-rhyme taxonomy”

Tangent - Monktoberfest 2016: Bryan Cantrill - Oral Tradition in Software Engineering link to this video (only 2:43 in ... so after the relevant clip, start over and you'll catch back up quickly) > so let's just do a little experiment here ... um ... so if I say Jingle Bells Batman Smells you say ... > okay where did you learn that? If that's not a movie reference; it's not not from a TV show; you learn that the way I learned that you learned that - on the playground. You learned that from another eight-year-old another seven-year-old ...
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