Posts in the Software Development category

Quora recently changed the site in some heinous ways. They removed the details from all questions, because they're trying to make sure that there's only one "canonical question" you can search for an answer to.

Unfortunately this destroys nuance - after all, there's only so much detail you can put into 250 characters.

So in response, I'm going to start migrating all of my question answers on Quora to my blog. It's going to take a while, but hey, more content for the blog.

A few minor things they might not cover in whatever book or class you're using (and way more important than ancient maxims like Keep It Simple Stupid)...

Writing Comments in your Code

Documenting intent in code comments is important. Some programmers believe that the source code is the documentation - they've never had to maintain someone else's code.

Documenting what each line of code does, however, isn't desirable, unless it's not obvious. So comments like "This implements a piecewise-linear approximation of a sin() function" - awesome.

Comments like "This adds 1 to the count" - terrible, unless it's some ungodly mess of functions to do that thing - in which case, there's probably something horribly wrong with the code, and the reason for that mess is worth documenting, not what it does.

Write Readable Code

Write readable code. Readable is more important than optimal - because code always has bugs. (And you in 6 months time will thank you).

One of the things that I passionately hate about software development is defining the same data in multiple places. The reason for this is that it massively increases the chances of getting an annoying, hard to solve bug for no good reason.

The easiest way to explain this is with error codes. For error codes, you need:

This article is going to be a lot simpler than the other articles on C!! (which hopefully are still percolating a bit). Mainly because I want to handle something simple before I dive into deeper waters – like generators.

So if you were going to redefine C++’s type system, how would you do it?

My goals are to make the types explicit sizes where possible, and obvious where not. And some of these are (as with everything else in C!! at this point) up for debate.

By the way, simple doesn’t mean short, sadly. This is a long one.

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One of the more annoying things that you have to deal with when writing code that targets a variety of different platforms is endianness. You see, like in Gulliver’s Travels, there’s two camps in the computing world – those who break numbers up into clusters of 8-bits, starting at the least-significant part of the number and laying it out a byte at a time that way in memory (little endian) and those who start at the most significant 8-bits, and lay them out a byte at a time in memory until they get to the smallest part (big endian).

(Actually most chips these days seem to let you strap a pin to signal or ground to flip the default order, or set a bit in the BIOS to change it to whichever order you want, but most people use the default).

This is really annoying if you’re a game developer. PCs are little-endian. Old-school Macs? Xbox 360? Wii? PS3? Yeah, they’re big-endian. Network developers too; port numbers are always big-endian. And you need to remember that, or you’ll have problems.

This means that you end up littering your PC-based editor code (your development environment) with code to swap the byte order during serialization – which is harder to read than it should be. And if you forget, the bugs can be difficult to find. And if you take stock code written for one platform and move it to another, you often have to go in and change all kinds of things.

Let’s fix that.

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