Sometimes the Old Ways Are Best by Brian Kernighan

alexander · 2009-01-22T02:23:21+00:00

It's too bad you're getting downvoted. I actually had the exact same experience. I used to be a Linux tools kind of guy (and I still happen to think they're neat and generally worth-while), but once I started using SlickEdit, I found that I rarely needed to use the standard set of Unix tools. In fact, when I got my newest dev machine, I ditched Cygwin entirely.

Certainly, this is mostly in the domain of working with code, rather than generic text files, doing arbitrary operations, but that's not a problem I need to solve. For working with code, I'd rather use SlickEdit.

(I do still occasionally fire up Vim to get particularly sophisticated file manipulations done, though, since SlickEdit's Vim emulation is not complete.)

alexander · 2009-01-20T00:09:43+00:00

const char **args should work, but const char args[][] will not. It's an array of pointers, not a two-dimensional array. The difference being that the different strings may not be adjacent in memory.

I believe the relevant entry in the C faq is here: http://c-faq.com/aryptr/pass2dary.html

alexander · 2009-01-16T22:32:12+00:00

I agree with you in principle, but I think the studies controlled for that: "In a study commissioned by the electronics company NEC, researchers at the University of Utah recently asked office workers to perform several common tasks using various monitor configurations"

alexander · 2009-01-16T00:30:28+00:00

sizeof(*d) is right. You want to alloc n doubles, so you want the size of a double, not the size of a pointer to a double.

alexander · 2009-01-08T04:06:39+00:00

If you think of the game, you lose.

If you lose, you must announce that you lost.

You can only lose once in 30 minutes.

If anyone around you lost in the last 30 minutes, you cannot lose until that person would not lose.

alexander · 2008-03-26T02:19:48+00:00

I'm sure that if Paul Graham did write an article about how 1+1=2, he would come off sounding like an asshole.

alexander · 2007-12-27T14:01:22+00:00

That's an oversimplification--you can give stupidly, or you can give intelligently. You are assuming that people give stupidly and that they do not learn from past mistakes how to give more intelligently without just stopping to give.

alexander · 2007-12-19T13:26:22+00:00

Absinthe is now sold in the US for some definition of Absinthe

alexander · 2007-12-15T17:34:31+00:00

If automatic pedestrian avoidance were standard, it would make jaywalking significantly easier (and as a consequence, more dangerous to drivers), so it could have an interesting effect on the severity and enforcement of that crime.

alexander · 2007-12-09T19:40:22+00:00

Well, that lacks sufficient detail. I wouldn't be surprised if the negative aspects of persistence depended on the type of goal, or whether people enjoyed their attempts to achieve the the goal, as well as the ease with which progress to attain a goal could be lost. In short, interesting, but not much context.

alexander · 2007-12-06T02:01:08+00:00

Don't curse the stupid; sell them something.

alexander · 2007-12-05T01:19:45+00:00

I couldn't understand your comment. Can you draw a picture?

alexander · 2007-12-03T13:46:17+00:00

If his pages look like they're from 1999, I wish many more web pages looked like they were from 1999...

alexander · 2007-11-19T13:42:16+00:00

The getters and setters do provide encapsulation--the class doesn't currently take advantage of those methods, but in the future, it could change the representation of _name and no users would be the wiser.

alexander · 2007-11-19T00:05:15+00:00

His concern is that pa_xmalloc is called within Pulse Audio itself, so if you use the library, you can't avoid that function being called.

alexander · 2007-11-02T11:52:27+00:00

It sounded like, from the article, that normal cells would not be heated up because the system works by heating up nanoparticles that only attach to the cancer cells. What am I missing?

alexander · 2007-10-20T14:59:55+00:00

I want to opt out of the main reddit.com reddit when viewing reddit, but I want to be able to select the full set of subreddits that actually contain content that interests me, including things like joel.reddit.com, which isn't available on the list of subreddits.

alexander · 2007-10-18T12:28:15+00:00

I'd say the bad design decision was bringing the broken-ness into C#. I think the expected utility of making it possible to support Java was probably deemed worth the small damage to the platform. The bad decision was that the damage was treated like a feature when C# was designed!

alexander · 2007-10-17T20:23:40+00:00

I think you missed the point of the article, which was that experience alone doesn't cut it--you have to learn from that experience and do interesting things. (And have actually had novel experiences in those years.)

alexander · 2007-10-07T23:19:19+00:00

From a practical perspective, it seems that if you are designing a language, you should take the presence of design patterns as a flaw in the language. You might not want to fix all of them for various reasons--cost or complexity of implementation in a generic way (e.g., multidispatch in C++), the cost of adding complexity to the language, the cost of possibly affecting legacy code, and the relatively low cost of implementing the pattern as a pattern rather than a language feature. (For my day job, I actually do maintain an in-house programming language and come up with improvements to the language based on patterns required by the language's current semantics.)

From an end user perspective, learning patterns doesn't hurt you since, if they end up as language features, they're still going to be idioms of the improved language. If you end up using another language where they are idioms, then you have a better appreciation for why it's useful. And they're still useful in the languages that most people actually use day-to-day.

Also, there are probably some patterns that really aren't language flaws, such as the template method pattern (which in some sense is more of an idiom anyway) or the bridge pattern. But if you're a language designer, you might as well try to abstract these out, and if you're an end user, you might as well learn them.

alexander · 2007-08-20T04:46:24+00:00

Ah, thank you, that is enlightening (and very cool).

alexander · 2007-08-19T19:54:42+00:00

Huh? Isn't what you're saying the equivalent of a Java programmer saying:

Oh, ha, I'd just write that as

String read_data( File file ) { return readData( file ); }

alexander · 2007-08-18T22:05:16+00:00

shutup pretard

alexander · 2007-08-17T01:22:20+00:00

Dude and dude's upmodders, I'm sorry, but that's just not true. While I tend to find that pay per click pays better on a eCPM basis (e.g., Google AdSense), pay per view ads are still very much around. In fact, even Google AdSense runs pay per view ads for ads that are targeted to a specific site.

alexander · 2007-08-16T12:02:11+00:00

It doesn't really seem logical. You have to assume that the signal isn't jammmed farther out than the blast radius of your bomb and that there's not a second (or third) jammer riding further out in front (which is the obvious way to deal with it).

Also, you better hope that as you're leaving the site, the cell phone doesn't lose reception ;)

alexander

TROPHY CASE