Going Native 2012 Keynote Stroustrup

This sounds like the kind of problem that puts really expensive robots into craters. link to this video There's a salient point in that talk where he describes a mission that failed due to a human error. Someone forgot to convert an internal representation of a unit in some algorithm which led to a miscalculation and a loss of some millions of dollars. Apparently the error made it through all of the code reviews and tests that were written. Bjarne then shows some pretty simple code that might have avoided such a disaster by specifying your types up front and letting the compiler do the work of converting them. Seems like a pretty simple concept and I wonder why it's so often missed.

GoingNative 2012 - Bjarne Stroustrup talks about C++ 11. Very good talk about the ideas behind C++ 11 link to this video

"I understand what you are trying to say and I think that you are wrong." --Bjarne Stroustrup, to a chorus of razzes, jeers and laughter at a question in going native a few years back. link to this video about 1:09:30 But hey don't take my word for it, my reputation is nothing and I'm as anonymous as a wrong number whether I like it that way or not. How about Ken Thompson? His doesn't seem to be similar, if you like an argument from authority - and I think such argument has a place if not used exclusively. "I would try out the C++ language at AT&T as it was being developed and make comments on it. It was part of the work atmosphere there. And you'd write something and then the next day it wouldn't…

…don't matter. I wouldn't fight too hard over it. It's just that it's so very, very clear that one way is bugs for zero benefit while the other isn't. Meh. So here's Bjarne being "Uber-Macho" to the delight of the conference crowd. Note the quote: "I think I understand what you're saying and I think you happen to be wrong." (crowd whoops in glee). link to this video This is a pretty ugly way of saying "I disagree and this is why..." But the crowd loves it. That attitude ge…

The talk: link to this video Sadly the 25-line original code isn't presented; the code that is presented is the 5-line replacement using the STL's `find_if` and `rotate`. Bjarne sketches the idea that those five lines can be further condensed into two lines with the non-STL `gather` algorithm: auto dest = std::find_if(v.begin(), v.end(), contains(p)); stdx::gather(v.begin(), dest, v.end(), [](const auto& elt) { return &elt == &*source; }); But this is overkill — replacing an O(distance(source,dest)) non-allocating rotate with an O(v.size()) potentially-allocating stable_partition — and more importantly it re-complicates the code. Now, I think part of his point is that `stable_partition` is "simpler" th…

Honestly while there are some use cases I think the advantages of linked lists over arrays usually disappear in actual real world systems. Sure algorithmically it has fast inserts and edits, but in practice it will pretty much always be offset by chasing pointers. Additionally it doesn't really matter if you only need to change a 64-bit pointer when you have to write the 4kb memory page anyways. [video