Bird Names, part of the new gig
It's an exaggeration to say that Twitter's moving from a Big-Ball-of-Mud monolithic RnR architecture to a loose confederacy of services, but after you tone down the hyperbole that's roughly what's happened in the past couple of years. The good news is that if you're an engineer who wants to work on, say, the display of promoted tweets, you can probably figure out the three or four services that you need to work with instead of sifting through piles of code that you don't understand. The lead lining on this silver cloud: when service-oriented architecture was a fun new idea in the organization, your colleagues gave things clever names. (But we're learning better, especially in the past year or so.)Specifically, many ~1-year-old services have bird names. Some of them aren't so bad. Our big-graph database service is flockdb, which sounds like something that might hold a big social graph. (It might even be easier to remember than "pregel," the name of a similar database, which only makes sense if you know some obscure urban-riparian geography.) Some names make less sense: Why is that called Ostrich? Why is that called cassovary? If there were just one or two bird-y services, it might be easier to keep them straight. But there are dozens of them. I'm not an ornithologist. My brain doesn't have that many separate, uhm, pigeonholes for bird-names; I get them mixed up. I'm not the only one; new engineers grumble about it. Not-so-new engineers grumble too.
More recently, services have cropped up with "boring names". We say "boring names" but there's a note of relief in our voices when we say it. I forget exactly what the name of Twitter's ad service is but that's because I don't have to remember it: It makes sense. I guess it's something like "the ads service."
But there's always the temptation to backslide. Even for me, and simplicity-of-explanation is my stock in trade. I blame Steve Yegge, as one does.
Steve Yegge works on a project called Grok. (Works? worked-and-now-champions? I dunno, I'm out of touch. Furthermore, a bunch of folks besides Steve work on it. Anyhow.) It's a pretty neat project, by which I mean it could change software engineering. The gist of the idea: right now, every programming editor program wants a parser for every computer language. That is, if your fancy IDE is supposed to know how to format a C function, it needs a simple C parser; and another parser for Java; and on and on. If you want to try out Erlang but your IDE doesn't have an Erlang parser, you probably give up. Obscure languages stay obscure: they don't have good tool support. If someone wrote an Erlang parser for some other IDE, your IDE can't use it; you have to start over from scratch. Since only chumps start from scratch, you probably give up on Erlang.
The Grok project is basically a parser-for-tools standard: if you design a language, you write a grok-parser for it, and that will output an parse tree in a standard format; if you design an IDE, you design it to read that format. A new language doesn't have to write 20 parsers to support 20 IDEs. An IDE doesn't need 20 parsers to support 20 languages. Nice
At Twitter, we write a lot of Scala. There's some nice tooling for writing Scala, but I think about the future when Twitter has more Scala to wrangle and I dunno if our nice little tools will keep up. Maybe Grok will save us! (More likely, at least in the near-term, excellent hardware will save us. But maybe Grok!)
I was thinking about these things, when the wordplayish part of my brain had a clever-stupid brainstorm: It will fall to Twitter to write the Grok-parser for Scala. And "Squawk" would be a perfect birdy-name for such a project: a birdy Sca-ok sound. I felt insufferably proud of myself. Probably I felt as proud as whoever named "Ostrich." But then I thought: if you already knew it was a Scala-Grok parser, then "Squawk" would make sense. But if you just heard "Squawk," you might not think Scala-Grok. You might think... when do birds squawk? When they're alarmed? If I hear the name "Squawk," I assume it's a service that monitors machines and sends out pager alerts when those machines look crash-y.
I had to tell you about that bit of wordplay so that you can marvel at my cleverness. But I hope that if we ever do have opportunity to write a Grok-Scala parser that we call it something like Grok-Scala.
