considered-harmful

GOTO still considered harmful?

Everyone is aware of Dijkstra's Letters to the editor: go to statement considered harmful (also here .html transcript and here .pdf) and there has been a formidable push since that time to eschew the goto statement whenever possible. While it's possible to use goto to produce unmaintainable, sprawling code, it nevertheless remains in mod...

Best practices considered harmful?

I read an article a few months back where the author suggested that best practices were bad. I can't find the article, but bonus points to the first person who does. Basically the premise of the article was that labelling something a best practice would cause most people to accept it at face value and not investigate even better ways t...

Side effects in an iterator considered harmful?

I've written my first C# iterator today. Woohoo. Interestingly, it has side effects. My iterator filters out invalid files from a directory and returns a sequence of valid files to process. Wheneve it encounters an invlaid file, it moves it to another directory. I tried implementing it as a LINQ query, but really don't like the fact th...

Is XML considered harmful?

The title of the question pretty much says it all. But these are the keypoints that I am interested to find out, and they are just totally random in my mind: Does it it make your job as a developer easier or harder? Does it make you more or less productive? Parsing with a DOM parser requires more memory to hold the entire structure of...

C++ Iterators Considered Harmful?

At the Boost library conference today, Andrei Alexandrescu author of the book Modern C++ Design and the Loki C++ library, spoke about why iterators are bad, and he had a better solution. I tried to read the presentation slides, but could not get much out of them. I have these questions for the StackOverflow community: Are iterators ba...

Should UTF-16 be considered harmful?

I'm going to ask what is probably quite a controversial question: "Should one of the most popular encodings, UTF-16, be considered harmful?" Why do I ask this question? How many programmers are aware of the fact that UTF-16 is actually a variable length encoding? By this I mean that there are code points that, represented as surrogate ...