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  Haskell’s effect on my C++: exploit the type system

Like most programmers, I was attracted to Scheme by the promise that it would make me a better programmer. I came to appreciate the functional style, but swapped to Haskell, a more developed language with a rapidly developing standard library. Unfortunately, for me, Haskell can’t yet replace C++ on a day to day basis, so I reluctantly spend my days tapping away at C++. So, were the promises true? has functional programming made me a better programmer? Better is a tough question,...

   Haskell,C++,Type system,Comparison     2012-02-06 07:44:35

  How the Go language improves expressiveness without sacrificing runtime performance

This week there was a discussion on the golang-nuts mailing list about an idiomatic way to update a slice of structs. For example, consider this struct representing a set of counters. type E struct { A, B, C, D int } var e = make([]E, 1000) Updating these counters may take the form for i := range e { e[i].A += 1 e[i].B += 2 e[i].C += 3 e[i].D += 4 } Which is good idiomatic Go code. It's pretty fast too BenchmarkManual 500000 ...

   Go,Expressiveness,Performace,Sacrifice     2012-02-12 04:53:55

  Reducing Code Nesting

"This guy’s code sucks!" It’s something we’ve all said or thought when we run into code we don’t like. Sometimes it’s because it’s buggy, sometimes it’s because it conforms to a style we don’t like, and sometimes it’s because it just feels wrong. Recently I found myself thinking this, and automatically jumping to the conclusion that the developer who wrote it was a novice. The code had a distinct property that I dislike: lots of ...

   Code nesting,Readability,Maintainability,Reduction     2012-01-02 08:13:46

  Why do C++ folks make things so complicated?

This morning Miroslav Bajtoš asked “Why do C++ folks make things so complicated?” in response to my article on regular expressions in C++. Other people asked similar questions yesterday. My response has two parts: Why I believe C++ libraries are often complicated.Why I don’t think it has to be that way. Why would someone be using C++ in the first place? Most likely because they need performance or fine-grained control that they cannot get somewhere else. A Ruby programmer...

   C++,Complicated,C++ PRogrammer,Design pattern     2011-12-31 15:45:39

  The "C is Efficient" Language Fallacy

I came across an article yesterday about programming languages, which hit on one of my major peeves, so I can't resist responding. The article is at greythumb.org, and it's called Programmer's rant: what should and should not be added to C/C++. It's a variation on the extremely common belief that C and C++ are the best languages to use when you need code to run fast. They're not. They're good at things that need to get very close to the hardware - not in the efficiency sense, but in the...

   C,GCC,Fallacy,Evolvement     2012-01-09 08:54:46

  mysql – connection example

Mysql is a database, and to gain access to the data within C++ you will need to be able to “talk” to the database via queries (just like on the mysql command line interface e.g. select * from tablename), the connection process is very similar to the command line interface you will need to supply connection details as in hostname (localhost normally), username, password, database to use and also there are other details that you can pass e.g port number more information can be gained f...

   C++,Database,MySQL,Connection,Example     2011-10-29 00:42:10

  Why Dynamic Programming Languages Are Slow

In a statically typed language, the compiler knows the data-type of a variable and how to represent that. In a dynamically-typed language, it has to keep flag describing the actual type of the value of the variable, and the program has to perform a data-dependent branch on that value each time it manipulates a variable.  It also has to look up all methods and operators on it. The knock-on effect of this on branching and data locality is lethal to general purpose runtime performance. T...

   Dynamic language,Slow,Analysis     2012-03-26 15:33:11

  Erlang Style Concurrency

Introduction On an evolutionary scale of innovation from one to ten (one being Bloomberg and Citi Group, eight being Google and Cirque Du Soleil, and ten being the company you couldn't imagine in your wildest dreams), the company I work for is about a three1. Being employed by this bastion of ingenuity affords me certain opportunities I can't get elsewhere. For example, every developer gets to interview potential...

   Erlang,Concurrency,Lock,Message,Innovation     2012-01-03 10:44:44

  Why Good Programmers Are Lazy and Dumb

I realized that, paradoxically enough, good programmers need to be both lazy and dumb. Lazy, because only lazy programmers will want to write the kind of tools that might replace them in the end. Lazy, because only a lazy programmer will avoid writing monotonous, repetitive code – thus avoiding redundancy, the enemy of software maintenance and flexible refactoring. Mostly, the tools and processes that come out of this endeavor fired by laziness will speed up the production. This ma...

   Good programmer,Lazy,Reason,Dumb     2012-04-18 07:15:23

  The ugliest C feature:

<tgmath.h> is a header provided by the standard C library, introduced in C99 to allow easier porting of Fortran numerical software to C. Fortran, unlike C, provides “intrinsic functions”, which are a part of the language and behave more like operators. While ordinary (“external”) functions behave similarly to C functions with respect to types (the types of arguments and parameters must match and the restult type is fixed), intrinsic functions accept arguments of...

   C,,Fortran,Intrinsic functions,C99,Ugly     2011-12-26 08:33:27

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