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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...