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Scott Meyers calls this the The Keyhole Problem and has a paper with a bunch of good examples.

My "favorite" modern example of the problem is Chrome's omnibox auto-completion, you get six results at maximum, they don't even give you a scroll bar or a "Show more" link, six results only. There used to be a command line option to increase it, but they removed it some years ago, it's now a hardcoded constant in the source code.

I've been pretty impressed by the training my company has been able to put together lately.

• Seth Hallem, founder and former CEO of Coverity came to teach us about their static analysis tool.
• Dan Saks came to teach us about embedded software best practices.
• Scott Meyers came to teach us about using the STL effectively.
• James Grenning came to teach us about test driven development.
• Michael Barr came to teach us about real time scheduling.

Most of these guys are well respected in their fields, and while not exactly famous, are names I had seen more than once in connection with those topics. All of them spent some time looking at our company's needs specifically before doing the training in order to customize it for us. Our company isn't small, but not huge either. We have around 1600 employees, a few hundred of which took the training. It has really helped us revitalize a lot of our old school techniques. If a company our size can put a line up of training like that together, it ought to be within reach of most mid-size organizations.

Boehm's (and the others') point is that it is not possible to provide robust and efficient synchronization support in the form of a library -- that it must be part of the language itself. A good example of this is the double-checked locking "anti-pattern" http://www.aristeia.com/Papers/DDJ_Jul_Aug_2004_re vised.pdf/

If you are a C++ developer, check out Scott Meyer's webpage on the TR1 additions: http://aristeia.com/EC3E/TR1_info.html

Much of this functionality is already available in gcc4. The includes are stuffed in the TR1 subdirectory (#include ) and all the functionality is stuffed in the std::tr1 namespace (std::tr1::array).

Perhaps your googling skills need a bit o' work ;-)

TR1 is the Technical Report (#1) on C++ Language Extensions. In other words it covers the standard library rather than the language itself.

Try one of the following:
Technical Report PDF http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers /2005/n1745.pdf
Scott Myers Summary: http://aristeia.com/EC3E/TR1_info_frames.html

Interesting for sure. A better idea than Boost if you ask me. I hate Boost because it's too big. It has some good stuff, some crappy stuff, some low level stuff, some high level stuff, a horrible build system, and as a whole it's huge. Just annoying and poorly planned. They might as well just have set up a CPAN type system. Forget trying to make "standard" stuff.

Plus a lot of stuff in Boost doesn't make programming easier. They take such a convoluted or over-engineered approach to certain things that you don't gain anything.

TR1 looks better because it just has the "most needed" type stuff in it. Simple and generic. Loki has some nice stuff in it too.

I don't think you will have to wait 2 years. It's probably doable right now. Compilers are much better than they were a few years ago.

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OK, this is my last post on Slashdot... WTF is wrong with this thing? "You need to wait 2 minutes... It has been 48 minutes"... What moron wrote this code?!

Scott Meyers looks like Jon Bon Jovi!

Did anyone else other than me who was doing MSVC6 projects in 1998 suddenly get real worried that this guy was stuck working on your old code?

ROTFL :):)

Just in case: Sorry, Pete. I can only claim extreme ignorance and inexperience, and offer you all my sympathy.

*mutters random Latin and waves hand* "You are forgiven, child. Say a dozen Hail Meyers, then go forth and sin no more."

*grin* Well, to be fair to whoever the basta^Wguy was, he did do it under fairly stressful conditions and he was in fact building the application based on some really horrendous mid-80's era C code. The sort of C code where you get stuff like: int tmp1, tmp2, tmp3, tmp4, ...; Be afraid, be very afraid.

In fact, if I'd been in his position, I don't know that I would have done much better. *pause for thought* No, that's a complete lie, I would have done it much better. It still wouldn't have been all that good, but at least it'd be tolerable.

Sigh... which reminds me, I'd better get back to it. Arrrggh.

Thanks for the sympathy Fedallah, I appreciate it. ;-)

Pete.

I'd really like to be able to say that it wasn't that great, but then a bunch of you would come running at me with machettes.

Oh and btw, make sure you have the credentials if you want to be in the same room as these guys. They're lev21 geeks and won't teach to anyone below lev18, sorry.

The problem with on-line C++ is that many people who claim to write about it don't know their subject, and consequently write superficially correct code that actually sucks. I'm sorry to name names, but the much-recommended-here CPlusPlus.com is one such site; their "Hello, world!" program at the start of their isn't even correct. I'd give sites like that a miss if you're seriously interested in learning C++.

One good source of information about C++ (and many other programming-related subjects) on-line is the related Usenet newsgroups, particularly the group specifically for learners if you're just starting out, or the moderated C++ group for more advanced subjects.

Many of these groups also have helpful FAQs, available (as usual) via the Internet FAQ Consortium. Again, for those just starting out, I'd particularly recommend the alt.comp.lang.learn.c-c++ FAQ, which has links to helpful on-line resources, free compilers, etc.

There are a few web sites of which anyone in the C++ field should be aware.

• You can get generally pretty sound book reviews for thousands of books on these and related subjects at the Association of C and C++ Users web site.
• Herb Sutter's web site has lots of informative and thought-provoking C++ articles by one of the guys who's advanced C++ programming technique a lot in recent years.
• Similarly, Scott Meyers' publications page has many worth-reading articles on C++.
• It would be remiss not to mention Boost, a collection of very good general-purpose C++ libraries. If you can't see how to do something with the standard stuff, the answer -- or a useful idea to find it -- may well be here.

There are a few decent on-line references to the standard library:

• Dinkumware make a standard library implementation, which is shipped with Visual C++ amongst other things, and provide some helpful documentation on-line. (NB: The version that shipped with VC++ 6 was flawed in many horrible ways, but that wasn't really Dinkumware's fault given the compiler limitations at the time when they wrote that library; please don't judge them by that alone.)
• SGI's implementation of the "STL" parts of the C++ standard library is excellent, and well-documented on-line.

About the only decent on-line C++ tutorial I know of the electronic version of Bruce Eckel's "Thinking in C++" books. You can find a complete copy of these, and several of his other books, at his books web site. (He also has books on Java, C#, Python amongst other things, and all of his work I've read has been reasonably good.)

C++ may not be "timeless," but it's here now, and will be here for many years. Besides, improving yourself in one language helps reveal patterns and designs in other languages. C++ will be influencing language design for a long time.

So, here are a few C++ oriented books that I'm very fond of. All of them helped me improve as a programmer, not just in C++.

If you're working in C++, you probably want The Design and Evolution of C++ by Bjarne Stroustrup. If you're a C programmer considering C++, you need this book. It really helps get your mind wrapped around the language. C++ may be a mess, but at least you'll understand why it's a mess, and why it really couldn't have succeeded any other way. By understanding why C++ is C++ (and not, say, Java or C#), you'll write faster, cleaner C++. Even if you don't see C++ as the future, armed with the knowledge in this book you can better judge other languages.

For useful ways to improve your coding right away, I'm fond of Steve Maguire's Writing Solid Code and Scott Meyer's pair Effective C++ and More Effective C++ . Both will give you little improvements that will improve your code tomorrow, next year, and in five years. Parts of all of these books apply to any language. (My copy of Effective C++ is going on 10 years old, and I still find it helpful to reread occasionally.)