Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs - Episode 50: The Great Twitter War: Bryce vs JF

Episode Date: November 5, 2021

In this episode, Bryce and Conor have a fun chat about Bryce’s recent triumphant victory over JF Bastien on Twitter.Date Recorded: 2021-11-05Date Released: 2021-11-05ADSP Episode 49: Special Guest Dave Abrahams! (Part 2)ADSP on TwitterBryce Lelbach on TwitterConor Hoekstra on TwitterJF Bastien on TwitterHana Dusíková on TwitterOlivier Giroux on TwitterISO C++ CommitteeCppCon 2017: Hana Dusikova “Regular Expressions Redefined in C++”CppCon 2018: Hana Dusíková “Compile Time Regular Expressions”C++Now 2019: Hana Dusíková “Compile Time Regular Expressions with A Deterministic Finite Automaton”CppNorth SurveyIntro Song InfoMiss You by Sarah Jansen https://soundcloud.com/sarahjansenmusicCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/l-miss-youMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/iYYxnasvfx8

Yeah, just for everybody's benefit, we are always on camera when we do this, and I have just been wearing my bathrobe because I just came out of the shower and did my hair. You're going to cut that out. You're going to cut that out. All right. Welcome to ADSP, the podcast episode 50 recorded on November 5th, 2021. My name is Connor, and today with my co-host Bryce, we talk about the great Twitter war between Bryce and JF. Here's what happened, folks.

Well, not folks. Here's what happened, folk. Oh, shoot. You can't say. There's no singular of folks. Here's what happened, folks. Not folks. Here's what happened, folk. Oh, shoot. You can't say. There's no singular of folks. Here's what happened, listener. Yeah, because folk is a plural, too. Folk is like the people. Is it? The folk.

Yeah. The listener. We recorded. This is definitely the most last-minute recording. In fact, this is like post-last-minute. We could have done this live. the most last minute recording. In fact, this is like post last minute. We are now... We could have done this live. I mean, yeah, usually at this point,

I mean, a couple of times I've posted around noon, Easter standard time, but usually I post around 8 or 9 a.m. And we're recording this. It's what, 10, 10.30? 10 a.m., a.m. Because if it was p.m., I would be asleep. This is true, yes.

Because we recorded last night, and as we are veterans, and we are now at episode 50, Bryce's audio was completely garbled. And so even though the content was gold, it was fire, we had to throw it in the trash. Yeah, it was a really good episode and really good content. And I'm sad that it got lost. I don't know what happened. When I started recording, I noticed that my levels were like really high. And I just thought, well, that's just me being normally loud. And then I was like sitting in my chair in an awkward way as I often do. But I didn't really think much of it. But I must have hit some control somewhere in Audacity, which is the software we use

to record things that mess stuff up. But it seems fine this morning. So yeah. I thought about whether we should make this a live episode. I got up at 5 a.m. as I do these days, and I was like, I could tweet about it right now. And then I was like, yeah, but that's probably not a great thing to spring on, Connor. Yeah. Also, we would not have been able to talk about all of the stuff that we had to cut out of the beginning.

Yeah. It's good times, man. The behind the scenes of ADSP, it's, uh, you guys got a little taste. That's the thing is you don't listen to the podcast price, but at the tail end of part two of the Dave Abrahams, I put a little bit of the bonus footage, like after we had said, Oh, we're done recording. Um, but then we were, you know, uh, just, uh, what's the word? Not waxing lyrical, but just, we, I was very excited about the whole APL breaking into Princeton. And then we were chatting about it.

So, you know, we're starting to put some behind the scenes stuff. But yeah, there's other stuff that we can't say. And it's anyways, we're just teasing the listener. Let's try and combine. Well, we'll see. We'll see how far we get. So there's four things. So actually, there's a small silver lining in having to rerecord because I did forget about one of the things.

But there's four things. This will definitely be higher quality because now I'm prepared. I've rehearsed all of my points. I have my tabs open. I have my research. We'll see, though, because we're going to try and keep this episode 30 minutes. And we'll start, though, today with what we finished with last time, which is, so this is episode 50. If you're a longtime listener, you'll know from a few episodes ago that I said every 50 episodes,

we're going to plug our socials. And so yeah, ADSP, the podcast on Twitter, we just crossed a thousand followers. Thanks for following. Feel free to tweet at us there. I just passed 4,000 followers to which last night you said what, Bryce? You said that's... That's cute. That's cute. It's nice. I'm code underscore report. And Bryce, would you like to... I'm not sure how much enthusiasm are you going to be able to bring

to the story now that it's part two or it's the second time around. No, no, no. I still have the enthusiasm. Don't worry. I have endless enthusiasm for this topic. I... I have passed 10 for this topic. I have passed 10,000 Twitter followers, but more importantly, I have more Twitter followers than JF. And why is this more important?

Because one, JF is the person who badgered me into joining Twitter or coming in and actively participating in Twitter, as he did for most of the C++ committee. Like JF like created C++ Twitter for anybody who doesn't know. So he brought me there and I came to Twitter after him, but now I have more followers because I clearly am just far more likable and charismatic and good looking and all these other things than JF. Yeah. And I actually passed him over the summer, but I knew I couldn't say anything about it immediately because if I did, Hana and JF would immediately organize

some sort of campaign to unfollow Bryce to deflate my very, very oversized ego. And they would have been completely justified in doing so. But I was like, no, I need to be far enough ahead of him that when I tweet about it, it is challenging for him to reverse the situation. And so like there were, you know, at one point I was as many as like 200

or 300 followers ahead of him. And then like, you know, he'd tweet something great because like he's much better at tweeting than me. I don't know why I have more followers than him. Like he's way funnier, much better content. But, you know, he'd post something really good and then like he'd catch up and then like, you know, I'd post something like, you know, pretty good.

And then like I'd pull ahead again. Um, so it was like back and forth, like there were points where he got like as close as like being under a hundred again. Um, but I was finally like, you know, okay, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna really, uh, you know, get really far out ahead of him. Uh, so I'm just gonna wait until I hit 10,000 before him. And then, you know, that'll be good enough. And I mean, I should mention this. This is a little unfair to JF because one, JF just moved internationally. And two, JF has two small children. So he does not have as much time to shitpost on Twitter as, you know, say I do. Although he does manage to get an impressive amount in. But yeah, I have more than 10,000 followers on Twitter and he does not. He does not. Not yet.

But you should go follow him. But only if you're like, you can only follow him if you're also following me. You have to follow both of us. Yeah. You haven't even said your handle. Oh, my handle is BLolback, at BLolback. All right. And also, too, I just realized we're doing a lot of inside baseball. So do you want to explain who JF Bastion is and who Hannah Dusakova are? I'm sure there's a Swift developer. How can I explain who JF is?

So, Jay, I am the library evolution chair on the committee, on the C++ committee. And JF is the language evolution chair. But our friendship goes back far longer than that. I've known him since about 2016 or so. When I first joined the committee, I became very good friends with JF and Olivier. I first came to the committee to mostly go to the concurrency and parallelism study group, which is where at the time they spent most of their time. And now you have to introduce who Olivier is. Yeah, I'm getting there, I'm getting there, I'm getting there.

And so the three of us sat in the back of the concurrency study group, which is called SG1 together. And we were just instantly thick as thieves. Now, Olivier and JF have known each other since they were in college, at least. They're both French Canadians. They both went to some of the same schools. And they had been on the committee together before me longer. But we were just like, we were a little band. And it's funny because at that time, we spent about a year or two where it was just the three of us. We were just regular committee members. And we spent most of our time in SG1. And now today, Olivier is the chair of SG1, the concurrency group. JF is the chair of the language evolution

group. And I am the chair of the library evolution group. And so we never actually spend time together on the committee anymore. And I, you know, Olivier works at NVIDIA. I also work at NVIDIA. He's one of the reasons why I came and worked at NVIDIA. And JF is, he's just, he's like a bad dad joke generator. And he's like very hipster, very hipster, I'm going to say. Yes, and the jokes are very bad and they are incessant. It is hard to have a conversation with JF without him just speaking in puns. And it's like, hey, you want to have a mentorship meeting? And he's like, sure.

And you'll get three seconds in, and it's like, okay. But no, he... Meeting JF and Olivier at my first committee meeting, you know, a large, I think I can attribute a large part of my success in the committee to the friendships that I formed with them at my first few meetings. Yeah. And Hannah, you have to introduce her as well. Oh yeah, Hannah Nusikova, one of my closest friends who I

when did I meet Hannah? Oh god, I'm going to get in trouble because I'm going to potentially get it wrong. But I think it was CPPCon 2018. Yeah, but she came and she gave this lightning talk about her compile time regular expression engine. And I had been watching the lightning talks and I don't want to offend anybody who gave a lightning talk that year, but it was like her lightning talk was so good. And not only was the talk very good, but the technology she was showing the library was so good that it was like the, like I saw it and I was like,

wow, this is like, you know, this was the one thing that I paid attention to. Like I, before, before her talk, I was like, you know, messing around on my laptop, you know, multitasking, doing three things. I wasn't really paying attention, but then like she gave her talk and I was like, all right, laptop goes away. I'm paying attention right now. And it's funny because the way that, that her and I became friends is very similar to how you and I became friends. That, um, I saw both of you giving a talk. And then I knew at the end of that talk that we were going to be friends and that I was going to convince you to go and give a whole lot more talks because you were this first-time speaker, both of you, who was incredibly gifted.

And I could see that, but maybe you hadn't, you know, recognized that yet. But so, yeah, so I encouraged her to give a full talk. Maybe it was next year at CppCon, or maybe it was at C++ Now, but she's going on to give a number of incredibly impressive talks. And the way that she builds her slide decks are just, they are, it makes me feel bad about how I build my slide decks. Hers are just so good. So polished. And this is coming from, like, I consider,

like Bryce and I, we share a lot in common, but we love beautiful slideware. And yeah, Hanna Dusakova's, like her finite automata talk, where she had the, I think it was, she said it was, I can't remember. I'm going to get it wrong. But it was thousands of lines of JavaScript to generate these very smooth animations of the finite diagrams, like morphing from one to another. It was one of the most beautiful things. The best way to describe it is that the quality of Hana's presentations is what you would expect from a curated professional presentation

that was prepared by a team for some like major event. Like, you know, the quality of a TED talk, I think even probably beyond that, or like the quality of like a talk that a CEO was giving to announce some new product where like a year has been spent preparing this talk. And there was like a team of like 10 designers that built the slide deck and like everything was you know carefully curated and reviewed um yeah it's just um it's really next level it's not comparable to any of the other um talks that i've seen at any of the c++ conferences or tech conferences in general um because she essentially, she built this whole platform for her to give these talks. And she built this whole platform

for how to visualize, you know, how regular expression engines work. And it's just, even if you don't know C++, it's worth watching her talk. You'll definitely learn something about regex from it. But yeah, it's just, it's really something else.

Yeah. Yeah. And also she is now the chair of SG, I'm not gonna remember the number, right? Compile time? The seven, I want to say, the Reflection and Metaprogramming Study Group. Yes, she is chair of that study group the on the c++ committee all right well that was uh that was 20 minutes of twitter so now i think we're going to just spend the next 10 minutes on the last three things that i said and we'll have to we'll have to record our actual content episode um i don't know a different time so what was um

the other well so the the fourth thing that I forgot to mention last time when we recorded is that CPP North has a survey out that I'll link in the show notes that people should go and fill out. Just like asking, you know, are you interested in going to the conference? It's like, I don't know, two minute survey. It's got like five questions in it. If you are thinking about going or, you know, have responses to that, I'm sure the committee would be thrilled, uh, to get your feedback. That was number four. Um, oh yeah. And then the third thing was that, uh, do we want to talk about that? The right scan, left scan, um, now we should, we should try to squeeze in, we should try

to squeeze in the efficiency. Oh, should we do that? Well, so can you do it in like, we're try to squeeze in the efficiency. Oh, should we do that? Well, so can you do it in like, we're at 20 minutes now. So can you do it in like 10 minutes? I got it polished. So we did Twitter announcements and we did a survey announcement. We'll get to the two other things at some future episode. Now, listener, strap in for Bryce's explanation of the difference between efficiency and speed.

And more importantly, I think you nailed it, Bryce. 10 minutes. Yeah, although I gotta go get dressed and then run to my thing. So that was what I'm going to do is this is going to be split into two episodes. Now, Bryce, you just heard Bryce said that, said that oh yeah i can do it in 10 minutes and it ended up taking 32 minutes uh and uh because this is now a part of episode part one of this recording um we forgot we totally asked people to go follow us on our socials and we totally forgot you have to this is the once every 50 episodes where we're allowed to ask people to go and leave a review if you want so bryce would you like to ask the listener anything you'd like to say to them? Go and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts.

At least I assume that that's what we're supposed to do because that's what all the other podcasts tell me to do. That's not even what we're supposed to say. If you want to. Oh, if you want to. If you want to. You don't have to. We're not even imploring you.

I don't use to you know we're not even imploring you yeah i don't i don't use apple podcasts um didn't we say we were going to do an episode where we found these reviews and like we read them uh because neither of us have actually um have looked into them but we promise if you do go leave a review we'll find it in a future episode uh maybe episode 100 that's what we'll do what are you laughing about buddy i'm laughing because i really i really am gonna have to go because i'm gonna i'm gonna be late well that's not on me if that's on your 10 minute explanation no i'm gonna blame i'm gonna blame you i'm gonna blame you okay that's fine if i'm late thanks for listening we hope you enjoyed and have a great day