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{ Category Archives } programming

The Human and the Machine

I was watching George Dyson’s interesting presentation at TED about birth of the digital computer, and something rather frightening occurred to me.
When I started out with computers, maybe 18 years ago, I was in awe of them. Computers and what they did were a closed book to me, the way a great musician’s work is [...]

Fun with C++: new, delete and Some of the Rest of the Story

Every C++ programmer knows new and delete and how they work. At least it must be so. I sure as hell didn’t know all the theory and detail behind C++ memory management facilities until 3-4 years ago, and I’m obviously still learning the practical details. So, please bear with me and see if there are [...]

Time, Only Time

I have a post about measuring time in a game engine on the Grashasp Dev Blog. Give it a read if you have the time and you are interested.

Fun with C++: Function Try Blocks

C++ is complex. That might sound like an about right to two groups of people – those who don’t know C++ and those who really know C++ – but only those who really know understand the depth of that statement. I’m only beginning to learn C++ and I’m only just learning the depth of it.

Take [...]

Fun with C++: Singletons

I just realized that I’ve not posted anything technical in a long while. Here’s my effort to remedy the situation.
This is a modified version of the straightforward implementation of the “singleton” pattern (STFW yourself.)
Let me add this. I’m rather proud of this code, so I ask you please to give this code a read if [...]

Lisp in Python

This is definitely the coolest programming related text I’ve read in a long while: Church Encoding in Python. I even almost understood all of it!
I saw this on the Planet Python feed aggregation(?) (it is the second entry right now) which I got introduced to today.
But seriously, how cool is the CONS construction and [...]

How Much We Spend Waiting for Our Tools?

Absolutely no comment!

Fun with C++: Useless Consts?

Many C++ programmers see the keyword “const” as something redundant that only gets in the way. They curse Stroustrup and his ancestors each time they encounter a const-related compile error because of that view and fail to use it correctly quite often (note that I’m not saying that I’m not one of these people, but [...]

C++ “Glasses”!

The Slashdotters put together a list of questions for Bjarne Sroustrup to answer a while back. The Q&A is interesting on its own, but this comment by an anonymous coward (as they are called on /.) is the funniest piece of writing I’ve read in a long time!
Read the Q&A and the rest of the [...]

Java Ruining the Programmers of Tomorrow?

Read this post on slashdot, and this article that the post references. The comments on the /. page is interesting as well.
In short, we all know that today’s university graduates learn very little about programming and software architecture that has real value from their curriculum. This article focuses on the problems of high-level programming languages, [...]

Games, Games and Games

Games are interesting, and game programming is even more interesting.

No one understands it, in a traditional context. You can tell your family that you are writing navigation software for spy satellites, but not games. If you have moving graphics on your screen, then you are playing games and wasting your time. Note that it’s even [...]

OpenID, a Neat Idea

If you’re anything like me (wait, that’s not an insult!) you live a busy life online. You have a multitude of registrations and user IDs and passwords for many sites on the net. There are many ways to manage this inherent mess with different trade offs between convenience and security.
One methods that I came across [...]

Unguaranteed Order of Pre-main Object Initialization in C++ – Any Solutions?

The C++ standard leaves the relative initialization order of global and static data undefined. The only thing that the compilers must guarantee is that all such data have been initialized before the invocation of main(). In any large and well-designed project, there are no or very few global objects. But static member data in classes [...]