And taxes are good, right? Not like that's stealing or anything.
And it all goes to a good cause.
Yeah, because shit like highways, water and land management, law enforcement and public infrastructure is self-sustained, for free, with nothing but bunnies' farts and pixie dust magically coming out of Tinkerbell's ass.
From a C++ perspective, the only lately useful articles are from Andrew Koenig, but how the release of the articles is done has pissed me off so much I removed it from my feeds. His most recent article series, is at part 9: Abstractions for Binary Search. How about write an article that can be released in a single piece and consumed as such. Trying to consume parts of something every few weeks is an ineffective learning tool. There doesn't seem to be any more single articles. The interesting ones are broken up into multiple parts released every week or two. FUCK THAT. Give me an article that I can read, start to finish. Don't make me come back next week. I'm a developer. I'm already being torn six ways to sundown by various issues, I don't need a publication compounding that. Give me single, solitary articles that have all the content in a single page and I'm happy (it also makes the googling easier).
I am of a different opinion. I prefer to see complex topics broken down into segments. Yes, it is sometimes advantageous to have the entire enchilada. But I don't have much of a problem digesting pieces on a weekly basis (even though, like you, I'm pulled in all directions on a daily basis.)
I will miss it. I've been a fan of it since I got into CompSci back in 92. I remember fondly going through its articles. I had a subscription for it (alongside Windows Development Journal and others.) One would learn really nice stuff in these old school magazines. Hell, even catalog-like productions like "PC Shopper" would have great articles on software and hardware.
One thing, however. Couldn't Dr. Dobbs have adopted a model similar to InfoQ (which seems to be doing rather well)? I wish they had (but maybe it wouldn't have been Dr. Dobbs anymore.) Regardless, I will miss Koenig et al articles.
And that deserves a Darwin award. Seriously, couldn't they have gotten one in the first place? I seriously doubt, if they had well documented reasons to believe something was up, that they wouldn't have been able to find one.
This case was in the bag (or would have been in the bag), but authorities dropped the ball. I've been on jury duty, and I've seen this before. Cops drop the technical ball, and we in jury duty have to say "not guilty" even though we know deep in our guts that the guy on the stand did it.
It is annoying, but this is how the law is meant to operate in a civilized country. This just stresses the point that authorities need to do their shit better, all the time.
This has been my argument since my first exposure to the American "Free Movement" propaganda in the 4th grade. Teachers didn't like that. Especially when I made statements on the order of "the U.S.S.R doesn't have checks on their people moving from providence to providence either." Hell, even to go into Canada, I remember having to pass through a checkpoint where they reviewed my dad's license before permitting access (passport wasn't required back then).
If you made that statement, you were idiotically wrong, since there were checks in place to move to certain "special" regions, not to mention the wholesome deportation of ethnic groups within the USSR during and post WWII from their homelands to the other side of the union (without permission until many decades later to return, or even move from their new "homelands".)
How about you just let these "seasoned programmers" test out of the introduction classes and jump directly into the non-intro classes? Can't have that, though, as that would promote inequality further by giving them a chance to take sophomore level classes as freshman. Oh the humanity...
Indeed, I was thinking the same. If a student already has some CS background, he/she should be allowed to skip intro courses. We already do that with college assessment and AP programs for subjects such as Math, Chem, Physics and English Writing. So why not with CS? Put CS students through a comprehensive series of tests, and depending on the results, they should be allowed to skip intro-level courses (either granting full credit, or letting them take more advance courses for those credits).
Good luck using a portrait monitor to look at spreadsheets - it'd drive you mad by the end of the day.
Not just spreadsheets, but also side-by-side diffs. With my two monitors, I keep one portrait and one landscape. If I have one, I simply flip back and forth depending on the task (trivial on Windows, sometimes not so trivial on Linux, but still.)
The Case For Flipping Your Monitor From Landscape to Portrait
I have two monitors, one portrait for code view, one landscape for all other kind of shit (in particular to look at side-by-side diffs). And when I work with three monitors, I keep two protrait and one landscape. Basically the formula is one landscape, and everything else portrait.
For anyone who cares to work with code on a daily basis, this is just common sense. I cannot believe that developers have to make a case for it.
This is like "making a case to wipe your crack after taking a dump, and not before" kind of thing.
So, assuming you've at some point written large'ish middleware for two dozen more or less independent entities whose processes and hr policy you don't own, I take it you have some advice on how to convince them to voluntarily embrace such a culture?
I don't because I do not see a distinction between development and management/hr culture. It is one. You, the generic "you", either have the culture, or do not. You either keep it, or you let it devolve.
Even within large organizations, different departments will have different cultures, some better than others. The question (the one I never made) is not whether such a good culture can be kept by every organization of any size.
The question is, when a culture supports such a culture, can it handle self-imposed limits on code features. The answer is yes, and I've worked in very large organizations (10K+), on projects with product code bases spanning millions of lines and histories of many years.
I've seen it work. I have no reason to lie or make bullshit.
You either believe my personal anecdote, or you do not.
You had me until you said "Office Building"
Forcing residential homeowners to make these retrofits is one thing... it's wrong.
Uh, not home owners, but owners of rental properties. Whether the conflation of terms is accidental or if you are being deliberately obtuse, only you know.
The homeowner should be able to make the choice of if they want to risk it.
Not homeowner. Renting landlord. The later do not have the freedom to choose whether to keep their rental units safe or not. Do we really need to have a discussion of why?
The city could instead, inform future buyers with ratings... "Safe to magnitude 3" or whatever.
Homeowners, then buyers, as opposed to reality (landlords and renters.) You can frame the problem in any way you want, but that does not necessarily yield a valid argument.
This me-me-me-me-me-owner-buyer-me-me-me-me-NIMBY-BAD-GUBMINT-me-me-me shit really gets old.
always implementing the big three (default constructor, copy constructor and = operator.)
Or, in the case of the last two, intentionally declaring them private and NOT implementing them (or if you have a C++11 compiler, explicitly deleting them), so as to make the class non-copyable. Relatively few classes need to be copyable. Declaring the copy ctor and assignment operator private ensures that client code can't accidentally copy your non-copyable objects. Not implementing them ensures that if class code accidentally copies an instance, you get a link error.
Bingo. That is an ever better solution from the point of view of stopping things absolutely. The only problem I have with not implementing them is that we only find this out till linkage time. For large projects, or for testing, this can be a drag.
I much prefer to implement them private so that any code that accidentally attempts a copy gets stopped when the compiler hits the compilation unit (which could be right off the bat and closer to the code, as opposed to having it delayed all the way to the end during link time.)
First, OO languages tend to encourage design that revolves around state changes. While it makes it more manageable than a random mishmash where you can poke at things randomly, it misses the bigger picture which is that the state is really an enemy, not a friend.
That is absolutely true. Hard to say what it has to do with everything since (well-written) modular and procedural programming also deals with state change via ADTs and associated manipulator APIs. Think Ada's private and limited private types, or opaque pointers whose examples abound in Ada and C/C++.
Second, from maintenance programmer's pov there is no such thing as a unused feature.
Code reviews, scanning tools, processes, guidelines, stuff that programmers worth a shit abide by, that helps with that.
You can't control everything in a non-trivial project so anything can raise its ugly head.
Non-trivial projects that are 1) run well, and 2) staffed with competent programmers will use any and all of the tools I mentioned above. For example, I can use plain ints to pass pointers in C or C++. It is a feature. But we can have coding guidelines that prevent that, and code reviews and other static analysis tools that act as gatekeepers.
If you have #1 and #2, no problems. Lack either, then problem. I know, I've seen it when working in small and (very large) C/C++ and Java projects.
Software process management + developers == culture.
A good development culture will police itself against that with relative success IN ANY NON-TRIVIAL project.
A crappy development culture will never be able to police itself like that EVEN WITH TRIVIAL projects.
Go ahead and declare that you are not going to use templates or exceptions so you don't need to deal with them.
Been there, done that. Apparently you haven't.
See how far you can go before you end up debugging them anyway for some reason.
See my responses above. What this tells me is that either you have never worked with an effective development culture and/or you have very limited experience with quality development, code reviews and automated static code analyzers.
I used to believe in this until I had to work on both. Although one can compile best-practice C with a C++ compiler (sans the gotchas), that glosses over the idiosyncrasies of each language. C does not have initializers as in C++.
More importantly, it does not have references, type-safe casting operators and its template language is not turing complete as in C++. These differences will never go away, and these differences alter completely the type of design and implementation of your code and your abstractions.
Not to mention the C++ rules of PODs versus everything else which affect how we link C code with C++ code (and viceversa.) And modern C++ heavily uses templates in manner that makes the language resemble something else entirely. Whether that is a good thing is highly subjective, but whatever.
So from a practical point of view, it is sane to treat both languages as fundamentally different.
When we program in a language (be it Ruby, Java, C or C++ or whatever), we ought to do so in the idiomatic way that naturally exploits the best capabilities of the language. So with that in mind, we cannot treat C and C++ as the same language (and it is not quite accurate to compare modern C++ as a superset of the former, regardless of historical evolution.)
I do believe, however, that is very important, if not fundamental, to understand C semantics to use C++ effectively. The fundamental semantics behind the primitive types and control structures remain more or less the same. And I've always found that C++ programmers without a good background in C tend to make certain mistakes when they need to operate with pointers (since they are so used to work with references.)
Furthermore, integration of C with C++ is not an uncommon task, and development of C++ code with that in mind is paramount. It is very hard to do that without a good understanding of C.
I was and still am a pretty accomplished C prorammer, and can find my way in assembly. Then C++ came along and everybody seemed to jump on that bandwagon. I couldn't and many of my collegues either. When you have progressed to far along the procedural path, it seems to be impossible to wrap your head around the object oriented paradigma. That is why I also never got into Java.
Paai
You need to progress through modular programming and abstract data types. Then OO makes a lot of sense. Well written, highly modular C code with good abstractions tends to resemble well-written C++ without operator overloading in my experience.
Hell, well-written modular programming resembles well-written OO programming (since the later can be seen as a natural extension... or conclusion of the former.) Well-written procedural code must exhibit characteristics of modular programming.
What happens with C++ (specially at the beginning of its development) is that everybody tended to use every single goddamend feature, abusing operator overloading (and later templates). So C++ became "equivalent" to "overloading gotcha and magic-behind-the-curtains" soup smeared over a tangle of classes in an inheritance tree from hell (in many ways, not dissimilar from Java at the beginning with its own gotchas.).
One can program clean C++ with very simple semantics, using operators to the bare minimum, using templates judiciously, knowing when to use virtual and always implementing the big three (default constructor, copy constructor and = operator.)
If you can modularize your procedural code and how to layer your abstractions, then you know how to split your code into modules and classes. You know how to encapsulate and delegate responsibilities. That is key for developing cleanly in C++ (or Java or C#... or in any language for that matter.)
Yes. For one, the true value of having two different block begin and end tokens is similar to the value of double entry bookkeeping. In Python there is only one "token" denoting a change of block (in this case the token is just the change in number of indent spaces). As a result, ambiguities and outright errors can be impossible for the parser to recognize.
You are absolutely correct. That, a lack of begin/ending tokens, a lack of a ternary operator, and (pre Python 3.x), limited lambda expression support are my biggest gripes with the language.
Im my opinion. any language that allows for "accidental violations that render [the] code invalid" is just garbage.
Like... missing a semi colon.
I mean, really, somebody or something put or remove a whitespace randomly (a whitespace so called because it is invisible)
Depends on the IDE (I typically configure Eclipse and Notepad++ to show whitespace). Hell, even VIM can let you do that.
Even without those settings, whitespace is not invisible either. And the rules are not that spacing must be neat and tidy, but simply that they are compatible within and among blocks.
True that people can accidentally mess it up (hell, I've done it myself)... but shit man, unit tests? CI? Testing code snippets in a REPL when you have one? There is not a goddamned excuse NOT to do any of that regardless of the language that you are using.
The only way for this rules to cause havoc is for people that are doing fire-and-forget programming. That is all.
will render your whole program invalid, and you defend such a language?
I'm not defending, I'm explaining and quantifying the problem, and I'm proposing, based on the evidence I've seen in real life, that continuous pain with indentation rules in Python have to do with people not doing shit they are supposed to do (continuous testing, coding small, testing small, refactoring, etc.) Shit that they are supposed to do in any language.
So, indentation rules are simply compounding problems that are more fundamental and closer to that area between the keyboard and the chair.
I'm not defending, I'm explaining.
And won't people crack it or get around measures in the same way people do for everything?
Most people do not. Do you really think the average smartphone user is going to be invest hours away to thinker and bypass such measures just to avoid paying $0.99 (the average price of an upgrade/add-in)? Most people, even tech savvy ones do not.
The sheer scale of the market makes it a number game. It doesn't matter if some people bypass the measures. There are potentially millions who do not, and of which a small fraction might pay for the upgrade. A small fraction of a very large number might still be large enough to get your ROI back. That is how it works.
I'll bet it was easier than hunting down the invisible bugs from mixed tabs/spaces or introduced by your editor mangling indentation while moving bits of code around.
Which is easily solvable by setting spaces-for-tabs in your editor (and which I do when working in Python,... or Java... or C/C++... or pretty much everything because that really solves a whole bunch of issues.)
And violations of spacing/indentation rules are trivially caught by with automated testing/CI, which I do with Jython... or Java... or even C/C++.... or pretty much everything whenever possible because it is the sane thing to do.
I've only been doing Python for 2 years, including C-to-Python bindings using Python 2.7x, Java-to-Jython/WLST integration (with Jython/WLST being based on Python 2.2), and a tiny bit of Windows automation with IronPython.
Most of my background is Java for enterprise development and C/C++ for embedded/system-level development.
As such, I initially I stumbled across some of the nuisances with Python, the spaces, the lack of a stack trace on exceptions, or the fact that exception hierarchies are slightly, but oh-so-different between Python 2.2 and 2.7. But past those stumbles, I simply use tool configs, procedures and coding standards to deal with them.
And that is the same when I do Java or C++. Each has their own gotchas and effective Java/C++ developers simply do the same - use tool configs, procedures and coding standards to deal with them.
Why would anyone mix tabs with spaces. Use one or the other, regardless of whether you do Python or not. If I see a code base in any language that has that shit mixed up, I know I'm bound to find some other stupid shit in the code.
Why? Because mixing tabs with spaces all over the place, like spelling errors, lack of meaningful comments and/or deeply nested code (arrow anti-patterns), these are all proxies for bad coding practices.
I originally found Python indentation rules to be annoying. After all, how hard is it to auto-indent from an IDE or a command line (or force an auto-indent of code before checking in, or en mass before merging back to the trunk)?
But you know what, people are idiots, and I've learned IN GENERAL not to expect them to write clean code (nor tell clean code from apple pie.)
It is still possible to write horrible Python code, but it is a lot harder to do so in it than in Java or C++ or C#. I would still have preferred to see Python having start and end markers for blocks (a-la begin/end or curly braces) on top of indentation rules.
But it is still a good compromise. Hard to see where code blocks end? Increase indentation. Better yet, refactor that shit out. If I see I have a harder time telling the end of a block, chances are that block is already large (time to refactor out), or that there is a lot of code around it (time to split it into better levels of abstraction).
You know, the kind of stuff we are supposed to do in any language anyways.
Besides, accidental violations that render Python code invalid, those things are trivially solvable by doing shit we are supposed to be doing anyway (namely, avoiding mixing tabs and spaces, automated testing, keeping code small and at least dry-run your shit before committing it to source control.)
I'm not saying programming in Python is Nirvana (for some things, it truly sucks.) But some of the things people complain about, they are just asinine complains for shit that broke because, on a fundamental level, they are not following good industrial practices IMO.
If the crime happens in public, and it IS a crime, I paid, I want to see it. Even if I have to wait til court is over, but as public OWNER of the footage I demand to see a return on my investment.
Protect the innocent by holding the film 'till after court. If they are guilty release it, if not, it wasn't a crime and it's no ones business. Whatever I do with MY footage then, is MY business. Fuck the guilty.
Police officer finds 9-year old girl, unconscious behind some bushes IN A PUBLIC PARK, completely nude and obviously the victim of a sex assault. The scene is captured on camera.
Using this real life scenario, care to run your "I paid, I want to see it" rant by me again? Are you really that obtuse or unable to think analytically that you fail to see how your idea is utterly idiotic?
He has a point. Every story about women in STEM is plagued with posts trying to disrupt any effort to improve things. Typical arguments include:
- There is no problem
- Girls just don't like computers...
Is it possible that either of these are true, even in a general sense? There are gender disparities in several fields. The median salary for nurses is $65,470, whereas the median salary for IT Technicians is $42,992
OMFG, who the hell would want to work in IT for less than $42K a year? Because if $42K/year is the median that would suggest half of all IT technicians are getting paid peanuts. Unless you live in a low-cost, rural small city or town, less than $42K/year is very goddamned low nowadays.
Stating calmly that you do not consent to the search as it is a violation of your rights is "bravado and grandstanding"?
Short answer: no. Long answer: that is not the type of behavior I'm referring to. Feel free to conflate the two if that gives you the last word. The entire topic of discussion is about a school teaching teenagers how to deal with police encounters. This is not about adults discussing common sense behavior.
Nice red herring btw.
Why would it have to be?
It doesn't. But that is not the type of behavior under discussion.
Oh wait your entire life advice column is hinged on that contrived notion.
No. It is an answer to this question in bold below:
"If your rights are violated you deal with it later"
What exactly do you gain by consenting to an illegal request of a power they do not have?
If you want to conflate topics, go for it, but don't get all uptight when people call you for being obtuse on purpose.
"If your rights are violated you deal with it later"
What exactly do you gain by consenting to an illegal request of a power they do not have?
Not get killed? Live for another day where you can fight for legal remedy, and hopefully create a legal precedent that will prevent such violations in the future?
Subservience only reinforces their grandstanding and power playing.
This is all bravado from your part. Until you have actually dealt with situations like that, face to face, you ought to temper it and think a little.
There are moments in life when it is appropriate to disobey a law and deal with the consequences (see Rosa Park or Gandhi, or recently Arnold Abbott).
This is specially true if violations of your rights (or your "violation" of an unjust law) is done in public, to bring awareness to a just cause. This is particularly true when violations are the manifestation of egregious institutions (colonialism, institutionalized racism, to less diabolical but still egregious ones such as laws preventing feeding of homeless.
Here, you, the generic "you", are full aware of it, and you have a made a decision to take the hit for a greater cause.
On the other hand, there are times to play possum, in particular if violation of your rights just happen because you are there on the wrong time, being incidental of you just being you, without you planning to take the hit for a greater cause.
In such cases when you are just living your daily life, play possum, litigate later. This is specially true when you have family that depends on you.
Telling other people to go martyr just because it sounds good and right, that's just unhelpful bravado. This has nothing to do with doing the right thing, but everything to do with making a post where you sound brave and rightful.
Ignorance of the law on the side of the police is not an excuse, just as ignorance of law among a civilian is no excuse.
None of that justifies telling other people to escalate things when in a position of vulnerability. This is not a comic book, and you are not GI Joe.
Learn to pick your battles, and you pick them, learn how to fight and win them.
No, just when they're committed by people with guns in positions of power.
That would exclude people without guns in a position of power. I know where you are coming from, but you better polish the logic you use to structure your arguments if you really want to make clear, precise points.
Slashdot Mirror
And taxes are good, right? Not like that's stealing or anything.
And it all goes to a good cause.
Yeah, because shit like highways, water and land management, law enforcement and public infrastructure is self-sustained, for free, with nothing but bunnies' farts and pixie dust magically coming out of Tinkerbell's ass.
Wooosh?
From a C++ perspective, the only lately useful articles are from Andrew Koenig, but how the release of the articles is done has pissed me off so much I removed it from my feeds. His most recent article series, is at part 9: Abstractions for Binary Search. How about write an article that can be released in a single piece and consumed as such. Trying to consume parts of something every few weeks is an ineffective learning tool. There doesn't seem to be any more single articles. The interesting ones are broken up into multiple parts released every week or two. FUCK THAT. Give me an article that I can read, start to finish. Don't make me come back next week. I'm a developer. I'm already being torn six ways to sundown by various issues, I don't need a publication compounding that. Give me single, solitary articles that have all the content in a single page and I'm happy (it also makes the googling easier).
I am of a different opinion. I prefer to see complex topics broken down into segments. Yes, it is sometimes advantageous to have the entire enchilada. But I don't have much of a problem digesting pieces on a weekly basis (even though, like you, I'm pulled in all directions on a daily basis.)
Dr. Dobb's 38-Year Run Comes To an End
I will miss it. I've been a fan of it since I got into CompSci back in 92. I remember fondly going through its articles. I had a subscription for it (alongside Windows Development Journal and others.) One would learn really nice stuff in these old school magazines. Hell, even catalog-like productions like "PC Shopper" would have great articles on software and hardware.
One thing, however. Couldn't Dr. Dobbs have adopted a model similar to InfoQ (which seems to be doing rather well)? I wish they had (but maybe it wouldn't have been Dr. Dobbs anymore.) Regardless, I will miss Koenig et al articles.
Even though police did not have a warrant,
And that deserves a Darwin award. Seriously, couldn't they have gotten one in the first place? I seriously doubt, if they had well documented reasons to believe something was up, that they wouldn't have been able to find one.
This case was in the bag (or would have been in the bag), but authorities dropped the ball. I've been on jury duty, and I've seen this before. Cops drop the technical ball, and we in jury duty have to say "not guilty" even though we know deep in our guts that the guy on the stand did it.
It is annoying, but this is how the law is meant to operate in a civilized country. This just stresses the point that authorities need to do their shit better, all the time.
This has been my argument since my first exposure to the American "Free Movement" propaganda in the 4th grade. Teachers didn't like that. Especially when I made statements on the order of "the U.S.S.R doesn't have checks on their people moving from providence to providence either." Hell, even to go into Canada, I remember having to pass through a checkpoint where they reviewed my dad's license before permitting access (passport wasn't required back then).
If you made that statement, you were idiotically wrong, since there were checks in place to move to certain "special" regions, not to mention the wholesome deportation of ethnic groups within the USSR during and post WWII from their homelands to the other side of the union (without permission until many decades later to return, or even move from their new "homelands".)
How about you just let these "seasoned programmers" test out of the introduction classes and jump directly into the non-intro classes? Can't have that, though, as that would promote inequality further by giving them a chance to take sophomore level classes as freshman. Oh the humanity...
Indeed, I was thinking the same. If a student already has some CS background, he/she should be allowed to skip intro courses. We already do that with college assessment and AP programs for subjects such as Math, Chem, Physics and English Writing. So why not with CS? Put CS students through a comprehensive series of tests, and depending on the results, they should be allowed to skip intro-level courses (either granting full credit, or letting them take more advance courses for those credits).
Good luck using a portrait monitor to look at spreadsheets - it'd drive you mad by the end of the day.
Not just spreadsheets, but also side-by-side diffs. With my two monitors, I keep one portrait and one landscape. If I have one, I simply flip back and forth depending on the task (trivial on Windows, sometimes not so trivial on Linux, but still.)
The Case For Flipping Your Monitor From Landscape to Portrait
I have two monitors, one portrait for code view, one landscape for all other kind of shit (in particular to look at side-by-side diffs). And when I work with three monitors, I keep two protrait and one landscape. Basically the formula is one landscape, and everything else portrait.
For anyone who cares to work with code on a daily basis, this is just common sense. I cannot believe that developers have to make a case for it.
This is like "making a case to wipe your crack after taking a dump, and not before" kind of thing.
So, assuming you've at some point written large'ish middleware for two dozen more or less independent entities whose processes and hr policy you don't own, I take it you have some advice on how to convince them to voluntarily embrace such a culture?
I don't because I do not see a distinction between development and management/hr culture. It is one. You, the generic "you", either have the culture, or do not. You either keep it, or you let it devolve.
Even within large organizations, different departments will have different cultures, some better than others. The question (the one I never made) is not whether such a good culture can be kept by every organization of any size.
The question is, when a culture supports such a culture, can it handle self-imposed limits on code features. The answer is yes, and I've worked in very large organizations (10K+), on projects with product code bases spanning millions of lines and histories of many years.
I've seen it work. I have no reason to lie or make bullshit.
You either believe my personal anecdote, or you do not.
It is as simple as that.
You had me until you said "Office Building" Forcing residential homeowners to make these retrofits is one thing... it's wrong.
Uh, not home owners, but owners of rental properties. Whether the conflation of terms is accidental or if you are being deliberately obtuse, only you know.
The homeowner should be able to make the choice of if they want to risk it.
Not homeowner. Renting landlord. The later do not have the freedom to choose whether to keep their rental units safe or not. Do we really need to have a discussion of why?
The city could instead, inform future buyers with ratings... "Safe to magnitude 3" or whatever.
Homeowners, then buyers, as opposed to reality (landlords and renters.) You can frame the problem in any way you want, but that does not necessarily yield a valid argument.
This me-me-me-me-me-owner-buyer-me-me-me-me-NIMBY-BAD-GUBMINT-me-me-me shit really gets old.
always implementing the big three (default constructor, copy constructor and = operator.)
Or, in the case of the last two, intentionally declaring them private and NOT implementing them (or if you have a C++11 compiler, explicitly deleting them), so as to make the class non-copyable. Relatively few classes need to be copyable. Declaring the copy ctor and assignment operator private ensures that client code can't accidentally copy your non-copyable objects. Not implementing them ensures that if class code accidentally copies an instance, you get a link error.
Bingo. That is an ever better solution from the point of view of stopping things absolutely. The only problem I have with not implementing them is that we only find this out till linkage time. For large projects, or for testing, this can be a drag.
I much prefer to implement them private so that any code that accidentally attempts a copy gets stopped when the compiler hits the compilation unit (which could be right off the bat and closer to the code, as opposed to having it delayed all the way to the end during link time.)
First, OO languages tend to encourage design that revolves around state changes. While it makes it more manageable than a random mishmash where you can poke at things randomly, it misses the bigger picture which is that the state is really an enemy, not a friend.
That is absolutely true. Hard to say what it has to do with everything since (well-written) modular and procedural programming also deals with state change via ADTs and associated manipulator APIs. Think Ada's private and limited private types, or opaque pointers whose examples abound in Ada and C/C++.
Second, from maintenance programmer's pov there is no such thing as a unused feature.
Code reviews, scanning tools, processes, guidelines, stuff that programmers worth a shit abide by, that helps with that.
You can't control everything in a non-trivial project so anything can raise its ugly head.
Non-trivial projects that are 1) run well, and 2) staffed with competent programmers will use any and all of the tools I mentioned above. For example, I can use plain ints to pass pointers in C or C++. It is a feature. But we can have coding guidelines that prevent that, and code reviews and other static analysis tools that act as gatekeepers.
If you have #1 and #2, no problems. Lack either, then problem. I know, I've seen it when working in small and (very large) C/C++ and Java projects.
Software process management + developers == culture.
A good development culture will police itself against that with relative success IN ANY NON-TRIVIAL project.
A crappy development culture will never be able to police itself like that EVEN WITH TRIVIAL projects.
Go ahead and declare that you are not going to use templates or exceptions so you don't need to deal with them.
Been there, done that. Apparently you haven't.
See how far you can go before you end up debugging them anyway for some reason.
See my responses above. What this tells me is that either you have never worked with an effective development culture and/or you have very limited experience with quality development, code reviews and automated static code analyzers.
C++ is C
I used to believe in this until I had to work on both. Although one can compile best-practice C with a C++ compiler (sans the gotchas), that glosses over the idiosyncrasies of each language. C does not have initializers as in C++.
More importantly, it does not have references, type-safe casting operators and its template language is not turing complete as in C++. These differences will never go away, and these differences alter completely the type of design and implementation of your code and your abstractions.
Not to mention the C++ rules of PODs versus everything else which affect how we link C code with C++ code (and viceversa.) And modern C++ heavily uses templates in manner that makes the language resemble something else entirely. Whether that is a good thing is highly subjective, but whatever.
So from a practical point of view, it is sane to treat both languages as fundamentally different.
When we program in a language (be it Ruby, Java, C or C++ or whatever), we ought to do so in the idiomatic way that naturally exploits the best capabilities of the language. So with that in mind, we cannot treat C and C++ as the same language (and it is not quite accurate to compare modern C++ as a superset of the former, regardless of historical evolution.)
I do believe, however, that is very important, if not fundamental, to understand C semantics to use C++ effectively. The fundamental semantics behind the primitive types and control structures remain more or less the same. And I've always found that C++ programmers without a good background in C tend to make certain mistakes when they need to operate with pointers (since they are so used to work with references.)
Furthermore, integration of C with C++ is not an uncommon task, and development of C++ code with that in mind is paramount. It is very hard to do that without a good understanding of C.
I was and still am a pretty accomplished C prorammer, and can find my way in assembly. Then C++ came along and everybody seemed to jump on that bandwagon. I couldn't and many of my collegues either. When you have progressed to far along the procedural path, it seems to be impossible to wrap your head around the object oriented paradigma. That is why I also never got into Java.
Paai
You need to progress through modular programming and abstract data types. Then OO makes a lot of sense. Well written, highly modular C code with good abstractions tends to resemble well-written C++ without operator overloading in my experience.
Hell, well-written modular programming resembles well-written OO programming (since the later can be seen as a natural extension... or conclusion of the former.) Well-written procedural code must exhibit characteristics of modular programming.
What happens with C++ (specially at the beginning of its development) is that everybody tended to use every single goddamend feature, abusing operator overloading (and later templates). So C++ became "equivalent" to "overloading gotcha and magic-behind-the-curtains" soup smeared over a tangle of classes in an inheritance tree from hell (in many ways, not dissimilar from Java at the beginning with its own gotchas.).
One can program clean C++ with very simple semantics, using operators to the bare minimum, using templates judiciously, knowing when to use virtual and always implementing the big three (default constructor, copy constructor and = operator.)
If you can modularize your procedural code and how to layer your abstractions, then you know how to split your code into modules and classes. You know how to encapsulate and delegate responsibilities. That is key for developing cleanly in C++ (or Java or C#... or in any language for that matter.)
Yes. For one, the true value of having two different block begin and end tokens is similar to the value of double entry bookkeeping. In Python there is only one "token" denoting a change of block (in this case the token is just the change in number of indent spaces). As a result, ambiguities and outright errors can be impossible for the parser to recognize.
You are absolutely correct. That, a lack of begin/ending tokens, a lack of a ternary operator, and (pre Python 3.x), limited lambda expression support are my biggest gripes with the language.
Im my opinion. any language that allows for "accidental violations that render [the] code invalid" is just garbage.
Like... missing a semi colon.
I mean, really, somebody or something put or remove a whitespace randomly (a whitespace so called because it is invisible)
Depends on the IDE (I typically configure Eclipse and Notepad++ to show whitespace). Hell, even VIM can let you do that.
Even without those settings, whitespace is not invisible either. And the rules are not that spacing must be neat and tidy, but simply that they are compatible within and among blocks.
True that people can accidentally mess it up (hell, I've done it myself)... but shit man, unit tests? CI? Testing code snippets in a REPL when you have one? There is not a goddamned excuse NOT to do any of that regardless of the language that you are using.
The only way for this rules to cause havoc is for people that are doing fire-and-forget programming. That is all.
will render your whole program invalid, and you defend such a language?
I'm not defending, I'm explaining and quantifying the problem, and I'm proposing, based on the evidence I've seen in real life, that continuous pain with indentation rules in Python have to do with people not doing shit they are supposed to do (continuous testing, coding small, testing small, refactoring, etc.) Shit that they are supposed to do in any language.
So, indentation rules are simply compounding problems that are more fundamental and closer to that area between the keyboard and the chair. I'm not defending, I'm explaining.
Paid? Then it's not free.
The add-ins are not. The app itself is.
And won't people crack it or get around measures in the same way people do for everything?
Most people do not. Do you really think the average smartphone user is going to be invest hours away to thinker and bypass such measures just to avoid paying $0.99 (the average price of an upgrade/add-in)? Most people, even tech savvy ones do not.
The sheer scale of the market makes it a number game. It doesn't matter if some people bypass the measures. There are potentially millions who do not, and of which a small fraction might pay for the upgrade. A small fraction of a very large number might still be large enough to get your ROI back. That is how it works.
I'll bet it was easier than hunting down the invisible bugs from mixed tabs/spaces or introduced by your editor mangling indentation while moving bits of code around.
Which is easily solvable by setting spaces-for-tabs in your editor (and which I do when working in Python, ... or Java... or C/C++... or pretty much everything because that really solves a whole bunch of issues.)
And violations of spacing/indentation rules are trivially caught by with automated testing/CI, which I do with Jython... or Java... or even C/C++ .... or pretty much everything whenever possible because it is the sane thing to do.
I've only been doing Python for 2 years, including C-to-Python bindings using Python 2.7x, Java-to-Jython/WLST integration (with Jython/WLST being based on Python 2.2), and a tiny bit of Windows automation with IronPython.
Most of my background is Java for enterprise development and C/C++ for embedded/system-level development.
As such, I initially I stumbled across some of the nuisances with Python, the spaces, the lack of a stack trace on exceptions, or the fact that exception hierarchies are slightly, but oh-so-different between Python 2.2 and 2.7. But past those stumbles, I simply use tool configs, procedures and coding standards to deal with them.
And that is the same when I do Java or C++. Each has their own gotchas and effective Java/C++ developers simply do the same - use tool configs, procedures and coding standards to deal with them.
Why would anyone mix tabs with spaces. Use one or the other, regardless of whether you do Python or not. If I see a code base in any language that has that shit mixed up, I know I'm bound to find some other stupid shit in the code.
Why? Because mixing tabs with spaces all over the place, like spelling errors, lack of meaningful comments and/or deeply nested code (arrow anti-patterns), these are all proxies for bad coding practices.
I originally found Python indentation rules to be annoying. After all, how hard is it to auto-indent from an IDE or a command line (or force an auto-indent of code before checking in, or en mass before merging back to the trunk)?
But you know what, people are idiots, and I've learned IN GENERAL not to expect them to write clean code (nor tell clean code from apple pie.)
It is still possible to write horrible Python code, but it is a lot harder to do so in it than in Java or C++ or C#. I would still have preferred to see Python having start and end markers for blocks (a-la begin/end or curly braces) on top of indentation rules.
But it is still a good compromise. Hard to see where code blocks end? Increase indentation. Better yet, refactor that shit out. If I see I have a harder time telling the end of a block, chances are that block is already large (time to refactor out), or that there is a lot of code around it (time to split it into better levels of abstraction).
You know, the kind of stuff we are supposed to do in any language anyways.
Besides, accidental violations that render Python code invalid, those things are trivially solvable by doing shit we are supposed to be doing anyway (namely, avoiding mixing tabs and spaces, automated testing, keeping code small and at least dry-run your shit before committing it to source control.)
I'm not saying programming in Python is Nirvana (for some things, it truly sucks.) But some of the things people complain about, they are just asinine complains for shit that broke because, on a fundamental level, they are not following good industrial practices IMO.
If the crime happens in public, and it IS a crime, I paid, I want to see it. Even if I have to wait til court is over, but as public OWNER of the footage I demand to see a return on my investment. Protect the innocent by holding the film 'till after court. If they are guilty release it, if not, it wasn't a crime and it's no ones business. Whatever I do with MY footage then, is MY business. Fuck the guilty.
Police officer finds 9-year old girl, unconscious behind some bushes IN A PUBLIC PARK, completely nude and obviously the victim of a sex assault. The scene is captured on camera.
Using this real life scenario, care to run your "I paid, I want to see it" rant by me again? Are you really that obtuse or unable to think analytically that you fail to see how your idea is utterly idiotic?
He has a point. Every story about women in STEM is plagued with posts trying to disrupt any effort to improve things. Typical arguments include: - There is no problem - Girls just don't like computers ...
Is it possible that either of these are true, even in a general sense? There are gender disparities in several fields. The median salary for nurses is $65,470, whereas the median salary for IT Technicians is $42,992
OMFG, who the hell would want to work in IT for less than $42K a year? Because if $42K/year is the median that would suggest half of all IT technicians are getting paid peanuts. Unless you live in a low-cost, rural small city or town, less than $42K/year is very goddamned low nowadays.
Stating calmly that you do not consent to the search as it is a violation of your rights is "bravado and grandstanding"?
Short answer: no. Long answer: that is not the type of behavior I'm referring to. Feel free to conflate the two if that gives you the last word. The entire topic of discussion is about a school teaching teenagers how to deal with police encounters. This is not about adults discussing common sense behavior. Nice red herring btw.
Why would it have to be?
It doesn't. But that is not the type of behavior under discussion.
Oh wait your entire life advice column is hinged on that contrived notion.
No. It is an answer to this question in bold below:
"If your rights are violated you deal with it later"
What exactly do you gain by consenting to an illegal request of a power they do not have?
If you want to conflate topics, go for it, but don't get all uptight when people call you for being obtuse on purpose.
Escalation is the only thing that changes things.
Rosa Park wants to have a talk with you.
"If your rights are violated you deal with it later"
What exactly do you gain by consenting to an illegal request of a power they do not have?
Not get killed? Live for another day where you can fight for legal remedy, and hopefully create a legal precedent that will prevent such violations in the future?
Subservience only reinforces their grandstanding and power playing.
This is all bravado from your part. Until you have actually dealt with situations like that, face to face, you ought to temper it and think a little.
There are moments in life when it is appropriate to disobey a law and deal with the consequences (see Rosa Park or Gandhi, or recently Arnold Abbott).
This is specially true if violations of your rights (or your "violation" of an unjust law) is done in public, to bring awareness to a just cause. This is particularly true when violations are the manifestation of egregious institutions (colonialism, institutionalized racism, to less diabolical but still egregious ones such as laws preventing feeding of homeless.
Here, you, the generic "you", are full aware of it, and you have a made a decision to take the hit for a greater cause. On the other hand, there are times to play possum, in particular if violation of your rights just happen because you are there on the wrong time, being incidental of you just being you, without you planning to take the hit for a greater cause.
You coming from an event and getting arrested because "you" look the profile, or getting handcuffed while picking up your kids because you look suspicious, even when teachers are vouching for you. Etc, etc.
In such cases when you are just living your daily life, play possum, litigate later. This is specially true when you have family that depends on you.
Telling other people to go martyr just because it sounds good and right, that's just unhelpful bravado. This has nothing to do with doing the right thing, but everything to do with making a post where you sound brave and rightful.
Ignorance of the law on the side of the police is not an excuse, just as ignorance of law among a civilian is no excuse.
None of that justifies telling other people to escalate things when in a position of vulnerability. This is not a comic book, and you are not GI Joe.
Learn to pick your battles, and you pick them, learn how to fight and win them.
No, just when they're committed by people with guns in positions of power.
That would exclude people without guns in a position of power. I know where you are coming from, but you better polish the logic you use to structure your arguments if you really want to make clear, precise points.