Re: Bit klunky, but...
it is also possble that the term "RPC" in Elon's mind means something different in their programmers' minds, like "we do not do RPCs we do "remote API requests" or something equally tedious and irritating [so typical of people trying to hide things, or maybe Simon the BOFH when he wants the boss to leave him alone].
Musk understands enough to know the *kinds* of questions to ask. He expects (as was pointed out earlier) straight answers, and NOT territorial spats and blame on "10 years of coding".
Some time ago I was working on an application that collected data and sent it to a server by phone. Circumstances being what they were, the person who designed the server side left the company (maybe because I asked too many questions). But it was taking MINUTES to do uploads from an iPhone... and it was due to server-side kludginess! Needless to say I went in and improved the upload efficiency by a factor of 10 by re-writing significant parts in C instead of python. But for some reason that was NEVER considered until I did it. of course my reward was to have my contract NOT renewed, and now the company no longer exists due to the INCOMPETENCE of those who ran the show. I think one of the people behind it simply liked Python and did not want to see an EFFICIENT solution replace the Django one, even when being called by DJango as external utilities to process things. [he even went so far as to re-re-design the hardware for the only product using features the rest of us had abandoned years before because it was proven to fail catastrophically in a short amount of time, but who am I, I am not a college professor, just an engineer... academic arrogance, nuff said. project and company DIED]
And THAT example is kinda where I think Musk wants to go - he has discovered an obvious bottleneck, he wants to know why it is being done that way, and he wants to re-do things to address the worst of the efficiency problems first. if it has to round-trip to the server several [thousand?] times, you have performance problems. I bet that's what he means.
That is pretty much what *I* would do, too.
(this sort of lines up with how AGILE is FRAGILE, why you do NOT make everything 'object oriented', and why falling back to a well established standard compiled language like C instead of 'new, shiny' is not necessarily a bad thing...)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
