We’ve all heard of the proverb that a butterfly flapping its wings in China can cause a tsunami in North America. This butterfly effect can also be “felt” in programming. Small details such as language choices and its API implementations, and even the type of hardware your program runs on eventually adds up. As demonstrated in the second chapter of Spolsky’s Joel on Software, nonchalant implementation such as specifying hard-coded array sizes can eventually lead to bugs and unfortunately into exploits. Now my question is, if this is an all too important fundamental question that everyone building a software system should know, then why isn’t this explicitly taught in programming classes?
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Filed under: Computer Science, agile and iterative, algorithms
If you have an itching question about C++, now is your chance. On July 20, Bjarne Stroustrup (that’s “B-yar-ne Strov-stroop” for you non-danish speakers), the ‘father’ of C++, is giving a talk on ‘C++0x Support for Generic Programming’.
This talk is free and open to the public, so if you’re interested feel free to come down to University of Toronto St. George Campus, specifically at Bahen Center for Information Technology (40 St. George Street) at 6:30 PM.
There’s also a chance for you to meet him face to face after the talk, if you’re brave enough, at Bar Mercurio restaurant (270 Bloor West). This event seems like it’s going to be a packed crowd, so be sure to head down early…and save a seat for me.
Filed under: agile and iterative, alma mater, bjarne stroustrup, c++
