Pierre Phaneuf's Diary

Reg Braithwaite was writing not long ago about how we can be the biggest obstacle to our own growth. It made me realize how I've dropped things that I was once a staunch supporter of.

I was once a Borland Pascal programmer, and I believed that it was better than C or even C++. I believed that the flexibility of runtime typing would win over the static typing of C++ templates, as computers got faster. I belived that RPC were a great idea, and even worked on an RPC system that would work over dial-up connections (because that's what I had back then). I put in a lot of time working on object persistence and databases. I thought that exceptions were fundamentally bad. I believed that threads were bad, and that event-driven was the way to go.

Now, I believe in message-passing and in letting the OS kernel manage concurrency (but I don't necessarily believe in threads, it's just what I happen to need in order to get efficient message-passing inside a concurrent application that lets the kernel do its work). I wonder when that will become wrong? And what is going to become right?

I like to think I had some vision, occasionally. For example, I once worked on an email processing system for FidoNet (thanks to Tom Jennings, a beacon of awesome!), and my friends called me a nutjob when I told them that I was designing the thing so that it was possible to send messages larger than two gigabytes. What I believed was that we'd get fantastic bandwidth someday where messages this large were feasible (we did! but that was an easy call), and that you'd be able to subscribe to television shows for some small sum, where they would send it to you by email and you'd watch it to your convenience. That's never gonna happen, they said! Ha! HTTP (which I think is used in the iTunes Store) uses the very same chunked encoding that I put in my design back then...

Note that in some cases, I was partly right, but the world changed, and what was right became wrong. For example, the 32-bit variant of Borland Pascal, Delphi, is actually a pretty nice language (ask apenwarr!), and while it isn't going to beat C++ in system programming, like I believed it could, it's giving it a really hard time in Windows application programming, and that level of success despite being an almost entirely proprietary platform is quite amazing. Even Microsoft is buckling under the reality that openness is good for language platforms, trying to have as many people from the outside contributing to .NET (another thing to note: C# was mainly designed by some of the Delphi designers). Imagine what could happen if Borland came to its sense and spat out a Delphi GCC front-end (and use it in their products, making it "the real one", not some afterthought)?

I doubt that's going to happen, though. For application development, I think it's more likely that "scripting languages" like Ruby, Python and JavaScript are going to reach up and take this away from insanely annoying compiled languages like C++ (and maybe even Java).

But hey, what do I know? I once thought RPC was going to be the future!

Related to my previous post, I would like to use MySQL++ as an counter-example: it's "result set" object does not have a "no more rows" method, it simply throws an exception when it is at the end.

See, this is a good example of something that is not exceptional at all.

Wow, I'm quite busy these days, haven't been writing (or reading, for that matter!) much...

Mostly, it's to blame on the quest for a place to live in that's going on. I'd like to buy, this time around, so this makes it a couple of notches more complicated than what I'm used to (I've never been an owner, so this is all new to me). The numbers bandied around are making me quite dizzy! Hopefully, we should come out of this with a nice place, but in the meantime, it's time for "let's save up money like crazy for the cash down", so on top of being busy with this stuff, it'll also make me less visible than I usually am (well, uh, it should still be better than the last year!).

In other more geeky news, I think I am succumbing to the coding style of the C++ standard library with regard to naming. For method names, there's more than a few people who are going to think "finally!" (I used to favour a Java-style interCap, like "readUntil", now I tend to prefer "read_until"). This makes a lot of sense, since this is also more common in C and Perl code. But the more controversial part is that the standard library uses all lowercase for class names (it's "unordered_set", not "UnorderedSet"), and I'm getting a crush on those too... Perl, Ruby and Python are using FullyCapitalized style for those, and so are a number of C++ programmers I know, but I'm finding that there is something to be said for adopting the style of the language. I'm also using namespaces and exceptions (mostly in constructors and object-returning methods) more, these days.

So either I'm becoming stylish, or I'm becoming senile. Oh well.

Also, it would seem that the giant jackhammers are following me.

I'm in a weird headspace these days. This is the first time I'm unemployed in, what, ten years? Totalling about four jobless months since I dropped out of school (which was no big loss!), and it was willingly both times, once again to move to Montreal. I'm being a bit of a homebody, which is not that different from my year in France (yes, I'd go to work, but that'd be almost all I'd go out for), but this time I'm not depressed, I'm just, you know, at home. Rather relaxing, I must admit, but better not over-extend this!

I went out photo-walking with jul3z last Saturday, which was quite nice. I had nearly zero inspiration for photos for a long time now, and coming back to Montreal, I've had it coming back to me, but seems like I was never carrying my camera at the right times (despite carrying it around a good deal, doh!). We went along the Lachine Canal toward the Old Port, and while it was a good time chatting along with her, mid-day sun and my self-imposed restricting myself to my 28mm/f1.8 didn't make for anything great, I feel, but it was nice pushing myself a bit, and I did spot a few places that could make very interesting photos with better light (by the way, jul3z, here's that chain that's gone missing!).

We then watched Stranger Than Fiction, which I had seen bits and pieces of on the flight from Casablanca to Montreal. To start off, it has a nice casting, with Will Ferrell (but it's not a Will Ferrell movie at all), Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson, and they did great job of giving some texture to the characters without being too blatant about it. For example, tiny details like Hoffman's character pouring himself some coffee at the start of a conversation, then as it ends, pouring back the content of his mug back into the coffee pot just had be imagine the lifecycle of his coffee, and what it must taste like at the end of the day. The subject is also one that I like, that of finding purpose and meaning in life, but it wasn't some overly cheesy grand meaning either, it was just the same kind of "ordinary" meaningfulness that I experience often, of appreciating what you have and being happy.

gregorama is right, girls in Montreal are a severe whiplash hazard! (hey, the subject says "random item", you were warned!)

The geeky type can find some dynamic language humour (Perl hackers know that there is indeed such a thing!) involving the Visigoths (that, the Perl hackers might not have known, but they probably suspected) here.

I boggle at how much attention to details Apple has sometimes, and how they manage to instil this attitude to their developer community. While I had previously noticed that, for some reason, moving around word by word in the location bar of my browser using the Control and arrow keys worked in a nicer way in Camino than it did in Firefox, where they use a slightly different set of delimiter characters, and they put the cursor in a different place depending on the direction you're going, avoiding the cases where you get just one character off of where you want to go (say, over a dot or a slash). But I just noticed that while double-clicking on a word selects that word, if you hit the Delete key, it deletes the word and the preceding space. Selecting character by character doesn't "discover" that you stopped at word boundaries, though. Oh well, for all I know, it's going to be in Leopard.

I'm probably one of very few people to be excited by what's coming in C++0x, especially as my top peeve about C++ templates seems to be fixed. One of my big use for template-based meta-programming was to detect errors at compile-time, but providing readable compile-time error messages is currently impossible (my error "messages" are often things like "variable YOU_FORGOT_TO_DO_THIS_THING does not exist", surrounded by a huge chunk of useless, unrelated context). Of course, actual lambda (even though Boost has a really neat hack to do it now) and type inference are very nice to have too. The latter will certainly help cut down on the amount of "foo<bar, baz>::const_iterator it = bob.begin()" typing I'll be doing, as it will now just be "auto it = bob.begin()"! My wrists thank the C++ language committee.

It seems one of my ideas has been picked up by some people in Waterloo, in the form of AideRSS. Now, I want an "Edit" button in the Firefox toolbar that would use AtomPub, okay?

We drank cheap sparkling wine the other day. When I say cheap, I mean 0.87 euro for a bottle. That's 1.34 CAD at the current rate.

I am also hacking on a modern C++ implementation of property lists. I am also getting rather hooked by some aspects of Boost. The binder is astonishingly clever and asio looks very promising. I'm also told their boost::function does not use a virtual method (unlike my attempt, WvCallback), which I'll have to look into.

No, there is no relation between the drinking and the hacking. :-P

Went to Mulligan's yesterday with the lady azrhey, hoping to play their quiz. Turns out that it starts at 23:00 (otherwise known as my bloody bed time, these days), and that azrhey's Black Velvet was all mixed. Oh well, it was otherwise nice, but I'm left to wonder how are people expected to stay up that late on week nights? A nap after dinner and head over there sometimes between 22:00 and 23:00? Hmm, maybe a plan...

While I like it, I find that I like more the atmosphere of the rue Pargaminières, around the Place St-Pierre and such. It reminds me a bit of the terrasses on St-Denis, or of Grumpy's. Which reminds me how much I miss meeting and hanging out with people. Where are my gay friends, those with otherwise odd lifestyles, the novelists, the playwrights, the artists, the hackers?

I have this weird situation where I'd like to hack very much, but when I get in front of my computer, I just flounder. I have a technical post in process on my laptop that's been going on for almost a week (it's not even that long!), and a corresponding bit of C++ that should be quite small, but seems like I just watch television instead.

At least, it's Torchwood, which I find cool. Rather different in flavour from Doctor Who, but it's got the quite hot Captain Jack Harkness as the main character, which I find very interesting. He's flexible.

I found a scheme for varying the music I'm listening to without doing so at the total exclusion of some of my favourites. I simply make a smart playlist that omits the artists listed in the top 10 of my weekly top artists. I might tweak this, but the idea is that I have too much of some bands in my list, so statistically, I end up listening to more of those, while I actually listen to individual tracks pretty evenly.

It's just striking me that I when I bought an album of the Colocs, I was remembering cheerful music, but I picked up their more critically successful final album, from just before Dédé Fortin committed suicide. Not exactly it. :-P

Bleh. Entertain me.