dwink i owned a company and all i got was this stupid blog

5Dec/070

The Shoulders Of Giants

Yesterday I took advantage of an opportunity to meet Scott Meyers and listen to him give a talk on one of his current pet projects, which involved the use of some creative C++ template meta-programming tricks to, as he put it, "generalize const".

The talk was a lot of fun for a number of things: one, it got me thinking about the continuum between a code segment's state of being ( having this feature ), through documenting that state as intentional (it *should* have this feature), to explicitly enforcing the requirement of that feature. Another was that it was very heartening to see the author of Effective C++ and Effective STL bang his brain against the complexity of Template Metaprogramming -- now I don't feel quite so bad when I'm digging in the bowels of boost::python or boost::mpl and end up staring at the screen and drooling -- Scott's been there too.

It also got me thinking about how iterative technology really is. Truly 'revolutionary' technology isn't technically revolutionary -- it's an incremental improvement from the previous technical iteration. What makes it revolutionary is what it enables in real life. I write code all the time that uses things like std::sort, which is a relatively simple thing in itself, but it depends upon all the other things -- the containers, the memory allocation, the memory manager, the bit order, the instruction set, and so on and so on down to the bare transistors simply behaving as expected. Good ol' std::sort wouldn't be very useful without that stuff -- and each of those things were minor revolutions of their times -- we've built on them and created meta-stuff, with meta-meta-stuff to specialize the meta-stuff.

So today I can do template magic to make the compiler do some extra work for me, and object-orientation to make my programs reflect the real world better, and I didn't have to figure out all the details of how to make those things happen. I just had to learn how the giants before me organized it so I can reuse it.

Someday, perhaps, something that I build will be like that for someone else, a problem that I poke and prod until I come up with a solution will become another std::sort for someone to grab onto and turn a task from impossible to possible, and from possible to simple.

Whenever that happens, though, it'll still be standing on the foundation laid by the giants who came before.

Tagged as: , No Comments
   

The Dwinkosphere

  • Oldest + Youngest, Best Buds

    Ben & Amelia, proving that a 7-year age gap is nothing when it comes to brothers & sisters & Playmobil..

    Posted via web from dwink | Comment »

    02/28/10

  • New York, New York

    The last time I went to NYC, it was for a conference. I brought along
    Becky and Ben, and they went off to visit friends while I went to listen
    to people talk about some Compliance thing or another. I don’t remember
    much of the conference, to be honest, but I DO remember ditching it one
    afternoon to walk around Central Park, Ben happily chasing his “Pumball”
    (a wadded up piece of paper — yeah, he’s always been this way). It feels like a lifetime ago.

    Now, we have too many kids to bring them along, so it’s just me. I’m
    going to work, and it’s cold outside. Probably will be so busy that I
    won’t even make it over to Central Park, much less to wander around it.
    Will be wearing dress clothes, and sitting in meetings, and maybe
    getting some of the locals to show me something interesting after work. I’m thrilled to be going again, though. There’s something about NYC that
    feels really good to me; maybe it’s that it is unabashedly City, that
    it’s such a hodgepodge of buildings and nooks and crannies and people.
    Or maybe it’s the streets and bridges whose names are famous nationwide, thanks to
    Sex and the City and countless other movies and shows: FDR Drive, Park
    Avenue, the Jersey Turnpike, Brooklyn Bridge — as a visitor, there’s
    great novelty in seeing that you’re riding on these streets that have
    been mentioned a million times. I imagine it’s the same feeling Chicago
    visitors get about Michigan Ave or Lake Shore Drive.

    So, this time I intend to breathe in as much as I can while rushing from
    airport to office to hotel and back to office again, embedding another
    fond memory into my cortex to tide me over until the next time I get to
    visit, because while Chicago is my home, I will always love New York.

    Posted via email from dwink | Comment »

    02/27/10

  • Go Ask The Daver.

    I gave some advice. Is it good advice? You be the judge.

    12/13/09

You Said…

Categories

(anti-) Social

Develop

Fun

Laugh

Linux

RSS