The Insider News

DaedTech[^]:

I ran across a method that returned an IEnumerable recently, and I implicitly typed its return value. During the course of a series of method extractions, code movement, and general refactoring, I wound up with some code that passed the various unit tests in place but failed curiously at runtime. After peering at it for a few minutes and going through once in the debugger, I traced it to a problem that you don’t see every day, and one that probably would have had me tearing my hair out if I didn’t have a good working understanding of what the “yield” keyword in C# does. So today, I’ll present the essence of this problem in the hopes that, if you weren’t aware of it, you are now.

Embedded in Academia[^]:

This propensity for today’s working programs to be broken tomorrow is what I mean when I say these languages are not future proof. In principle a big C/C++ program that has been extensively tested would be future-proof if we never upgraded the compiler, but this is often not a viable option. There is a long, sad history of programmers becoming seriously annoyed at the GCC developers over the last 10 years due to GCC’s increasingly sophisticated code generation exploiting the undefinedness of signed integer overflows. Similarly, any time a compiler starts to do a better job at interprocedural optimization (this has recently been happening with LLVM, I believe) a rash of programs that does stupid stuff like not returning values from non-void functions breaks horribly. Programmers used to think it was OK to read uninitialized storage and then compilers began destroying code that did this.

Jacques Mattheij[^]:

I’ve earned a good part of my life’s income to date taking other people’s C code, cleaning it up, making it work and then making it work better. In one sense the original program that this article is about is perfect, it takes the prescribed input, processes it and produces the desired output using the test set provided. That’s really all you can ask for in any program, under normal circumstances. Provided of course that the program produces its results in an acceptable time. What acceptable is is up to the user of such a program, in this particular case the writer of that article (linked at the end) used acceptable to mean ‘slower than Haskell’ and as a long time observer of the language wars this irks me.

The Brush Blog[^]:

My wife gave me a real geek book for Christmas: Masterminds of Programming by two guys named Federico Biancuzzi and Shane Warden. In it they interview the creators of 17 well-known or historically important programming languages. The book was a very good read, partly because not all the questions were about the languages themselves. The interviewers seemed very knowledgeable, and were able to spring-board from discussing the details of a language to talking about other software concepts that were important to its creator.

jasonbock.net[^]:

Interviewer: Yes, I understand that, but can you give me an idea of how much experience you have with brown? Roughly. Carpenter: Gosh, I really don't know. Once they're built I don't care what color they get painted. Maybe six months? Interviewer: Six months? Well, we were looking for someone with a lot more brown experience, but let me ask you some more questions. Carpenter: Well, OK, but paint is paint, you know...

JavaWorld[^]:

Once again, flaws in Java are creating big holes that hackers exploit to victimize users and, even worse, sabotage or spy on many of the computers that run key business processes at utilities, banks, hospitals, and government agencies. Enough already. Wake up and smell the coffee: Client-side Java needs to go, and fast. Even if the current bugs can be fixed, there will be more.

National Post[^]:

Ahmed Al-Khabaz, a 20-year-old computer science student at Dawson and a member of the school’s software development club, was working on a mobile app to allow students easier access to their college account when he and a colleague discovered what he describes as “sloppy coding” in the widely used Omnivox software.... “I felt I had a moral duty to bring it to the attention of the college and help to fix it, which I did. I could have easily hidden my identity behind a proxy. I chose not to because I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong.”

jtnimoy: The Work of Josh Nimoy[^]:

In addition to visual effects, I was asked to record myself using a unix terminal doing technologically feasible things. I took extra care in babysitting the elements through to final composite to ensure that the content would not be artistically altered beyond that feasibility. I take representing digital culture in film very seriously in lieu of having grown up in a world of very badly researched user interface greeble. I cringed during the part in Hackers (1995) when a screen saver with extruded "equations" is used to signify that the hacker has reached some sort of neural flow or ambiguous destination. I cringed for Swordfish and Jurassic Park as well. I cheered when Trinity in The Matrix used nmap and ssh (and so did you)....

Scott Hanselman[^]:

Everyone likes the idea of a cheat mode, or "God Mode." Many years ago - I think around 1993 - Doom introduced the idea of switching a player into God Mode within the game by typing IDDQD. You'd then be invincible and get to feel like you'd discovered an exciting secret "easter egg" in the game. How exciting the the developers hid this for us to find! You may have heard of a "God Mode" hidden in the depths of Windows 8 (or 7 for that matter)... and it "unlocks" a bunch of secret functionality. Let's try.