While I was at YAPC::NA this year, I got a chance to catch up with a few old friends and talk with some really knowledgeable people from other parts of the Perl programming community. One such discussion started when Rob Kinyon told me that exceptions are fundamentally flawed by design and should never be used.… Read More »
Yesterday, I wrote an essay on a comment made in Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horrors blog about regular expressions. While Atwood spends quite a bit of time on the two problems joke and talks passionately about regexes as a tool, he does take a swipe at the Perl programming language that seemed somewhat uncalled for. I… Read More »
One of the odd things about programming is that you are writing for two different audiences. One is the dumbest device ever invented (it does exactly what you tell it to do) and the other is a (hopefully) intelligent programmer who will need to read this code later. We spend a fair amount of time… Read More »
One of the things Java programmers seem to really like to hate in C++ is the concept of operator overloading. I have heard this from many Java programmers and seen it written by others. According to many, operator overloading makes C++ impossible to understand because you can’t tell what a piece of code is doing… Read More »
Several of the past few essays have focused on the notation aspects of programming languages. The major benefit of a notation is making what you want to say concise without losing it’s power in the process. To use an example from an earlier essay, supporting the use of normal algebraic notation for working with matrices… Read More »
A couple of years ago, I wrote a set of three essays on Resource Management: The Semantics of Garbage Collection, More Thoughts on Resource Recovery, and Other Resource Recovery Approaches. In summary, my argument in these articles was that the standard mark-and-sweep garbage collection falls down for two major reasons, it doesn’t deal with any… Read More »
I’ve seen quite a bit of interest in Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) on the Internet lately. Some good examples include Martin Fowler’s exploration of the subject: MF Bliki: DomainSpecificLanguage Language Workbenches: The Killer-App for Domain Specific Languages? He does point out that this is not a new idea. He uses Unix as an example of… Read More »
Secure Coding in C and C++ Robert C. Seacord Addison-Wesley, 2006 One very real problem in software today is the rise in security exploits of one kind or another. Gone are the days when we can just assume that no user of our software will try to break it, or use the software to compromise… Read More »
Beyond the C++ Standard Library Bjorn Karlsson Addison-Wesley, 2006 If you’ve been programming in C++ in the past few years you’ve probably heard of the Boost library. Boost is a large peer-reviewed set of classes and libraries designed to augment the C++ standard library. Beyond the C++ Standard Library serves as an introduction to some… Read More »
C++ Common Knowledge Stephen C. Dewhurst Addison-Wesley, 2005 The subtitle of this book sums it up nicely, Essential Intermediate Programming. If someone has not mastered, or at least understood, the material in this book, he or she is still a junior C++ programmer. Although this material is necessary, it is not sufficient to make someone… Read More »