For all the praise he gets here, few seem interested in his methods: writing complete programs, based on robust computer science, with minimal dependencies and tooling.
That was a sort of defining moment in my personal coding; a lot of my websites and apps are now single file source wherever possible/practical.
$ wc -l ...
265908 sqlite-amalgamation-3510100/sqlite3.c
I've had the inverse experience dealing with a many thousand line "core.php" file way back in the day helping debug an expressionengine site (back in the php 5.2ish days) and it was awful.
Unless you have an editor which can create short links in a hierarchical tree from semantic comments to let you organize your thoughts, digging through thousands of lines of code all in the same scope can be exceptionally painful.
The reason FB (and myself, for what it is worth) often write single file large programs (Redis was split after N years of being a single file) is because with enough programming experience you know one very simple thing: complexity is not about how many files you have, but about the internal structure and conceptually separated modules boundaries.
At some point you mainly split for compilation time and to better orient yourself into the file, instead of having to seek a very large mega-file. Pointing the finger to some program that is well written because it's a single file, strlongly correlates to being not a very expert programmer.
It reminded me how important organization is to a project and certainly influenced me, especially applied in areas like Golang package design. Deeply appreciate it all, thank you.
On reflection, however, I’m unsure how that goes when working on higher-order abstractions or cross-cutting concerns that haven’t been refactored, and it’s too late to ask.
You probably don't need this, but ...
It may not be immediately obvious how to approach modularity since it isn't directly accomplished by explicit language features. But, once you know what you're doing, it's possible to write very large programs with good encapsulation, that span many files, and which nevertheless compile quite rapidly (more or less instantaneously for an incremental build).
I'm not saying other languages don't have better modularity, but to say that C's is bad misses the mark.
You can do a huge website entirely in a single file with NodeJS; you can stick re-usable templates in vars and absue multi-line strings (template literals) for all your various content and markup. If you get crafty you can embed clientside code in your 'server.js' too or take it to the next level and use C++ multi-line string literals to wrap all your JS ie- client.js, server.js and package.json in a single .cpp file
You don't program much in C, do you?
It doesn't necessarily translate to people who are less brilliant.
Honestly, it's a reminder that, for the time it takes, it's incredibly fun to build from scratch and understand through-and-through your own system.
Although you have to take detours from, say, writing a bytecode VM, to writing FP printing and parsing routines...
We underestimate how inefficient working in teams is compared with individuals. We don't value skill and experience and how someone who understands a problem well can be orders of magnitude more productive.
You are absolutely wrong here. Most of us wish that somebody would get him to sit for an in-depth interview and/or get him to write a book on his thinking, problem-solving approach, advice etc. i.e. "we want to pick his brain".
But he is not interested and seems to live on a different plane :-(
Can you elaborate a little about the methods you mention and how you analysed them?
So much of the discussion here is about professional practice around software. You can become an expert in this stuff without actually ever learning to write code. We need to remember that most of these tools are a cost that only benefits for managing collaboration between teams. The smaller the team the less stuff you need.
I also have insights from reading his C style but they may be of less interest.
I think it’s also impressive that he identifies a big and interesting problem to go after that’s usually impactful.