joelangeway

One example that just occurred to me: The base 2 log of the number of legal positions of a 9x9 go game is about 126.3, which means if I use a good hash of board positions yielding twice that number of bits, I have a better than 50/50 chance of having no collisions. That is very good to know if you've got anything like a transposition table in a Go playing program.

Even if a JIT compiler can prove that all the code in your app doesn't change that function pointer, because the variable is volatile, the compiler must assume that you intend to read from actual metal every time you refer to it and it can not predict what the value will be. Even a JIT compiler is not allowed to optimize away that read, or else you'd never be able to write a driver.

Yes, it refers to a memory location, without implying anything about the semantics of the bits located at that location. You can't dereference or assign to the location because you don't know the type at that location. You can however assign that pointer to a typed pointer variable to actually read or write to that memory location. This is useful when you really care about the bits of memory but you're variable pointing to that memory could just as well be an (int64_t ) as a (char ) and those types are not interchangeable with each other, only with (void ). So library functions that just care about memory locations, not the semantics of the bits there, take (void ).

Some of this may be technically incorrect. This is my own mental model of the C language which is sometimes incomplete.

He says several times that JavaScript succeeded in spite of being a bad language because it was the only choice. How come we're not all writing Java applets or Flash apps?

> It's literally zero-sum for him.

Well it is. There are a finite number of consumers of C++ compilers. He is competing for the attention of potential free software advocates.

If you keep the same distance between you and the car in front of you regardless of your speed - which you seem to say -, I hope you are never behind me.

I personally have often gotten the impression that a large portion of developers already have The One Programming Language in their mind. It's usually Java or C# or sometimes still C++.

JavaScript fills me with joy because it is so unlike these languages and I get to watch people grow when they stop kicking and screaming and learn it. JavaScript doesn't have any super unique features or anything; it's just so not Java while frequently being suddenly essential to people who think in Java.

I concede the point. I hope I never have to herd that many cats.

This is a fundamental place where the worlds of C# and Java differ. Where the Java world would say, "developers might misuse this, better not have it in the language," the C# world says, "developers could really use this, better put it in the language."

A better analog than fixing a literal car might be changing the tire of a car which doesn't have any tires when it is parked but which instantiates some with the help of an instance of ITireFactory. Obviously it makes no sense for a car to use a tire factory instead of just having tires. That is exactly how everyone who prefers PHP feels about everything.

I don't think that those problems are really independent, but rather, share a common cause with some of the things that made PHP a success. PHP evolved as it did in large part because its benevolent dictator refused to think about more than one problem at a time. I don't argue that that's the optimal way to do things, but it did provide a unique experiment for us all to learn from.

I confess to making the mistake many times of thinking that I was capturing a value when I was capturing a variable, but the author has me confused and concerned that the semantics of lambdas have been changed such that a lambda always captures the value and not the variable. Capturing variables is darn useful and more general than capturing values. It would be totally unlike MS to break all of my code as much as I wish they would in other cases, so I'm going to assume that they've done something more clever than that.

I'd also be afraid they'd put lobbying efforts into state legislatures to make home grown text books illegal or set standards that are difficult to meet for teachers and which are easy for big publishers.