Updated 26th Feb 2024 to fix broken links
I find myself agreeing with Chris on this one. I just dont think I’m clever enough to use these ‘modern’ C++ template programming styles reliably in a way that makes the resulting code better and easier to maintain by others. I’ve tried, but I tend to end up with a confusing mess that I can’t understand when I come back to it. What’s more I often find that I can’t justify the additional complexity of the result compared to doing the work in the ‘old-school’ non template way.
I’ve been busy recently; what with getting our trip sorted, finishing the hand over, completing the auction server and doing some consultancy for an internet market data providing company. The good news is that most things are now done and soon I’ll have time to knock a few of the interesting looking items off of my “code this” list…
The auction server exceeded our client’s expectations; which was nice. The hand over has reached a point where I no longer feel like I’m pushing water up hill and the market data consulting is interesting and of finite scope…
I’d quite like to be able to harness the efforts of the comment spammers and MT-Blacklist so that when a spammer fails to comment on a posting this fact is noted and posting can get mentioned on the front page as the current “spammer’s choice”… Sounds mad, but since I have a lot of content now, it would be a way of bringing some old stuff back to the front page - in the same way that the comment section does…
I’m reviewing some code for a client. I’ve decided that I don’t like the #Region functionality from the VS.Net IDE… It seems to be another ‘sticking plaster’ to help make things ’easier’ for people to structure code in inappropriate ways…
I guess I’m not a fan of ‘outlining editors’; perhaps I’m just not used to them. Anyway, I can see why #Region might have been considered a good thing to design into the IDE given the way Microsoft love to push wizard generated code into places that you’re forced to also put user generated code (I know, it’ll be fixed in Whidby, ZZZzzz…).
I completely agree with Jeff on this one. Fear of breaking code can hold you back from making the kind of changes that are required to keep the code alive.
As a consultant I see this kind of fear a lot. Quite often I arrive at a client site and start to speak to the natives about the lay of the land and one of the first things they do is point out that their system is very very complicated and that you have to be very careful not to break things; right, I think, they have no tests then… Next I’ll be told that new features should be added without “disturbing” much of the existing code; which translates to, expect to see a patchwork of code that has been hacked in all sorts of wierd and wonderful directions…
I’ve uploaded a new copy of the NMPing.zip file that is mentioned in this article. It seems that it was corrupted. Sorry about the delay in doing this, I’d forgotten about it.
The code’s very old, so be gentle with it.
I sympathise with Christopher Baus’ frustrations…
I think that’s probably just par for the course; I like to tell myself that I gave up blogging for anyone else but me ages ago, I’m probably fibbing.
Arguably my most successful blog posting was this one about accessing bluetooth on XP via Winsock… Or perhaps it was this one, also about bluetooth on XP. Or, maybe, this one, about, well, you guessed it.
Christopher Baus suggests that Robert Scoble’s blog lacks focus and that his blog is mostly noise, “He’s always blogging about something, but really nothing at all “.
But Chris, surely that’s the point of Scoble’s blog? As Robert himself says “if you don’t think I’m taking you to enough cool blogs, or writing enough cool stuff, there’s a very easy solution. Unsubscribe.”.
I did that quite a while ago, but I’m glad he’s still out there and that other people subscribe to him on my behalf…
Excellent news; Herb Sutter and Andrei Alexandrescu’s C++ Coding Standards book is done!
This is the book I’ve been wanting for ages. Whilst there are other C++ coding standard books out there but, well, they just don’t have the gravitas of a book written by these two and included in Bjarne Stroustrup’s C++ In Depth Series.
The table of contents is here. I hope the book’s heavy enough to hit people with ;)
Jeff Atwood writes about the the delusion of reuse where he warns of the extra effort that’s really required when writing for reuse:
“I believe writing a truly reusable class is an order of magnitude harder than writing a single use class.”
He also warns of putting in extra effort up front with the intent of creating reusable code from scratch and suggests that you can’t know if you have a strong case for making some code reusable until you’ve written or used the same piece of code three times in different projects.
