Taste Matters!

I was listening to the latest “This Developers Life” podcast called Taste and it stroke a chord with me.

I remember arguing whether appearance matters at work with some guy from my previous gigs. His point was that it should not matter, as the most important thing is one’s brain and ideas. Needless to say he looked like a bum.

Ultimately, he is right. Looks probably should not matter. It does not matter in two cases:

• email communication. The other guy might be flesh eating alien or even a girl. I don’t care.
• when your pal says: “This guy is genius! He sleeps in a garbage can, but he is brilliant!”

These two cases, you don’t care how the other person look like, in all other cases, however, you do care. 

While it is correct that well dressed person conveys a message, I think it is more important that sloppily dressed person not only does not transmits the same message, but he conveys a negative message. Being a bum is to tell your colleagues: “I don’t care about you. I can come with my pajamas, uncut fingernails and unwashed, but you STILL will listen to me!”

It is a very negative thing to say to your co-workers…

Civilized Programming Language

Code worked and stopped working after minor changes. All of the sudden a loop is not working anymore.

 1     while(cursor != NULL)
 2     {
 3         printk("mock_config_cache: checking %x\n", cursor);
 4         if (mock_compare_cache_devices((mock_cache_device_t*)cursor, new_cdev))
 5         {
 6             printk("mock_config_cache: Device already exists: %x\n", cursor);
 7             status = IOCMD_ERR_DEV_EXISTS;
 8             mock_free(new_cdev);
 9             break;
10         }
11 
12         cursor = cursor->next;
13 
14         if (cursor == cache_devices);
15         {
16             break;
17         }
18     }
19 

It should be easy, but this is a kernel code, so I’ve spent 1.5 hours to debug this code. Even if it weren’t a kernel code, it is not always easy to attach a debugger and step through the code. I’ve added a loop to print the linked list, which is basically the same code:

 1 /* DEB */
 2     cursor = cache_devices;
 3     while(cursor != NULL)
 4     {
 5         printk("Cursor: (%x), next: (%x), prev: (%x)\n", cursor, cursor->next, cursor->prev);
 6         cursor = cursor->next;
 7         if (cursor == cache_devices)
 8             break;
 9     }
10 

The same code, but this one is working!

Another coffee and I see the bug. Line #13 in the first code:

1        if (cursor == cache_devices);

Notice the “;” at the end of the line! DAMN! This is frustrating!

Now, the compiler should have told me something, as the IF statement does not even have a side-effects!

These days I have read an article by Andrei Alexandrescu (C++ template guru) called: “The case for D”, where he praised D language as a better C/C++. Naturally, I wondered if D would do better in the above bug:

 1 import std.stdio;
 2 
 3 void main()
 4 {
 5     writeln("hello world");
 6 
 7     int i=3;
 8     if (i == 3);
 9     {
10         writeln("another hello");
11     }
12 }

OK. Let’s see:

C:\Users\derbep\Documents\Code\DTest>dmd if_test.d




if_test.d(8): use '{ }' for an empty statement, not a ';'

Much much better! Advance to D! It is better!