Blog Posts about Programming

The minutes from the Santa Cruz (October 2009) meeting are available here. Even if you're not a language layer at heart, I encourage you to read them.

In August I dedicated a series to the debate about C++0x attributes. I believe that it covered the subject in a balanced and detailed way, but I keep getting complaints from C++ users who don't like attributes for various reasons. Here's a recent email I received from a Polish C++ programmer. While it  doesn't represent my opinion about attributes -- I'm rather neutral about this feature and consider it a "solution waiting for a problem" -- but it suggests that attributes are still a highly controversial issue that will haunt C++ for a long time. The email is quoted here with minor edits that and as usual, with all private details removed.

Almost a year ago, I posted here The Web 2.0 Guy I Ain't. People wonder whether I still resist all those Web 2.0 features and technologies at the end of 2009.

Operator sizeof and typedef are among the first features that new language designers omit from their new born baby with curly braces to make a point: "this isn't yet another C++ clone". We're lucky to have them in C and C++, though.

People ask me for my opinion about attributes. Unlike with concepts (and several other harmful features that I've criticized before), I'm quite neutral about attributes. I don't think they're the best feature of C++0x nor are they the most sought-after feature but they certainly have the potential of solving certain programming issues that have hitherto been too loosely defined in the Standard, e.g., alignment.  

A lot has been said and written about the C++ standards committee decision to remove concepts from C++0x. I was among the first to report it on Informit and on other sites but recently several other independent accounts have been posted. "What happened in Frankfurt" by Douglas Gregor is one of the best reports about this issue because Gregor downplay or hide the disagreements and technical problems that arose prior to the decision to remove concepts.  

One of my programs crashed the other day in a very unexpected place.  A call to System.Threading.ConcurrentQueue.TryDequeue (from the Parallel Extensions to .NET) resulted in an OverflowException being thrown.  Investigation revealed a pretty serious bug in the System.Random constructor.

If you're eager to develop for Palm's webOS (and the Palm Pre), it looks like you're going to have to wait until the end of the summer...maybe.

We recently sat down with several top Objective-C and Cocoa developers to talk about that state of the iPhone and OS X markets as we approach this year's WWDC.  As we were wrapping up, we threw one last question at them out of curiosity, and we thought you'd like to see what some of them said.

We recently sat down with several top Java developers to talk about that state of the language as we approach this year's JavaOne.  As we were wrapping up, we threw one last question at them out of curiosity, and we thought you'd like to see what some of them said.

Having witnessed the PC revolution, Traenk pauses to reflect on the GUI world...

It's been a long while since you had a chance to be excited about a new version of an 'old' OS.  Now is your chance.