Some life hacking.

As I started several C++ blog posts but cannot finish a single one, there's definitely time for some some life-changing advice! This couple of lines from a great post seemed adequate:

Make a Habit of Making Things 

Too many people die with their best ideas still inside of them. 

Your legacy is what you share, not what you know or harbor within yourself. Unshared knowledge is like potential energy. It’s great to have, but it will never do anything unless you turn it into something else. 

Turn your knowledge into a book. Turn your inspiration into art. Turn your words into music. Turn your ideas into a business. Build something. Write something. Create something.  

... 

You can either be judged because you created something or ignored because you left your greatness inside of you. Your call.

I just let it uncommented as reminder and reference.

Disclaimer

I just had a cursory look on a couple of my latest posts and I was horrified! So many spelling and grammatical errors in there! But then again, I remembered that I've already spotted some of them before but didn't have the courage to correct them.

Courage? Did you really mean courage? Well yes. I'm sorry to say that, but Blogger is rather a difficult platform to be working with (to put it very mildly) and I didn't want to risk losing of all my formatting just because I'd like to correct some spelling.

So let's make an agreement: I won't touch the old posts (sorry...) but the new ones will be seriously proofread and not just jotted down and published in the spur of the moment. Promised!

Exegi Monumentum...

"Exegi monumentum aeris perennis"* - I don't know why but this line is always coming to my mind when I'm thinking about my father, who passed away more than 2 years ago. Just because he was fond of classical studies and Latin?

He also cherished that other lines of poetry, in a language that you can't possibly know, but which, as I can assure you, are work of a genius (I cite form memory):

"Wsrod takich pol przed laty, nad brzegiem ruczaju,
na pagorku niewiekim, we brzozowym gaju,
stal dwor szlachecki, z drewna, lecz podmurowany,
swiecly sie z daleka jego biale sciany,
tym bielsze, ze odbite od ciemnej zieleni,
topoli, co go strzegly od wiatrow jesieni."

You're right, that's a single sentence. And he could recite one after another in the endless flow of the language. Yes, you are right again, this is a hommage to my late father, which I'm writing 2 years too late. The first thing I'll always associate with him will be the classical poetry. The another one, linked via the above phrase of Horace, is a story of an interview and things which it revealed to me in retrospect.

It was my school appointment to interview someone and I choose to interview my father. I remember just a single question I asked: what do you want to be remembered for? The answer was somehow unexpected to me: he cited the line of  Horace, and said: I want to be remembered for the things I accomplish. And he did, he was working in local political bodies and was involved in building roads and water supply lines in our rural neighbourhood.

So when it came to finding a vocation, I wanted to build things! Not maths, physics, literature or music (things I was interested in), but engineering!

As for us in life there are 2 things which are worth of pursuing: for yourself, trying to understand the great scheme of things in that world (for practically minded, if you are more ambitious it's the universe then). But secondly, you owe it to the others, those before you and those to come after you, to keep the world running smoothly, and build new smootly running things to replace old ones.

I think, that's my father's heritage. And that's why I cannot be a geek - because I grew up listening to poetry, looking at nature of the rural coutryside and experiencing very practical achievements in very real world.

--
* fom Horace, translation mine: "I build a monument [to stay] for perennial ages"

Rentree plus Some Comments on Google-Solvers & Co

Hi everybody! I'm back from my travels and can write some more blog-gobbledegook again (which I'll gladly do). I was away for some serious off-piste skiing in St.Anton, descending some pretty steep, big faces, and taking my first pinwheel tumble on a 40 degrees, Alaska-like, highly exposed, rock-fringed slope. Whow! And then I was back in town, and procuring my next project in just 2 days, taking a head-first plunge here as well ;-).

So let me start my rentree into the blogosphere with something less exciting, i.e. some comments on my previous posts. In fact, I wanted to comment on the Google-Solvers post for quite a long time, so it suits me fine.

Commenting on Java vs. C++

As some of you maybe remember, in a previous post* I compared the perfomance of Python, Perl, Java and C++ (admittedly in a rather ad-hoc manner), and made at first the error of not using the optimization switch of my C++ compiler. Me, a die-hard C++ hacker!!! This resulted in Java and C++ being on par performance-wise. So you can imagine my amazement some time ago when I saw in Uncle Bob's blog these statements**:

You can blame this on the non-optimized gcc compiler I was using (cygwin) but again: Oh boo hoo!. If there are any C++ programmers out there who smirk at the supposed slowness of Java, I think you'd better reconsider.
...
I'll grant you that the JVM can be large. However, if you assume it's already there, then the size of the bytecodes for the application itself need not be very large at all. And the heap can be constrained to a relatively small size to prevent virtual memory thrashing. So, if _engineered_ a java app should give a C++ app a run for it's money in most cases. -UB

Well, this started me thinkig. When you are looking for information concerning Java performance, you can see some typical quotes like this on the web ***:

John Davies: It is just the main reason why there are still diehards that stick with C/C++ because you can guarantee performance, not necessarily faster, but it just guarantees the performance and we will run something in Java, it will run quite frequently faster on C [he means JVM] than it would have done in C/C++, but every now and then it will just pause and that pause can be extremely expensive.

If you'll allow a small comment (hypothesis?, heresy?) from yours truly: what if all those measurements are done without the -O2 switch? It's an all to easy trap to fall into (see my own sufferings*) and an excellent opportunity for the marketing people to use some techniques from the seminal book "How to Lie with Statistics" ;-). Becuse you really can't explain to me that a language which is: 1. interpreted, 2. relies heavily on dynamic memory allocation, and 3. supports garbage collection, can be faster than one which doesn't do it, no matter how much optimization you throw at it! Or can you? If you've read the "Discipline of Programming" book of E. Dijkstra, you know that the first law he establishes there is the "there-are-no-miracles law" :-). So you may guess my position on this.

BTW, maybe I (or someone else) should email Mr. Stroustrup on this one, and see what he's got to say. It would be interesting, I guess, so maybe I'll do it anyway.

And now more comments

Let's continue in the commenting vein: sometime ago I was looking for web-frameworks in C++, and wanted even reimplement Java's Servlet classes in C++ (well, I didn't...). But in the last DDJ I saw an article**** about a C++ web-framework at last! Fortunately, I didn't implement the C++ servlet classes, because it was a really stupid idea! The Wt-framework ("witty" - http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt/) seems to be rather like modern Java frameworks - GWT, ThinWire or Wicket - you define your application classes in C++, and the HTML rendering comes from the framework! In contrast to the Servlet specification, which is very low level and which nobody uses directly now! Thank God I was lazy! I'll have to try Wt out, perhaps there is an C++ alternative for web-programming anyway.

---
* http://ib-krajewski.blogspot.com/2007/07/google-solvers.html
** here he did basically the same but with Ruby in place of Python: http://butunclebob.com/ArticleS.UncleBob.SpeedOfJavaCppRuby
*** "Improving JVM scalability and performance": http://blog.chinaunix.net/u1/45382/showart_356477.html or http://go.techtarget.com/r/1950475/6108168
**** "Wt: A Web Toolkit": http://www.ddj.com/cpp/206401952

Some jokes for the new year

Happy new year everybody!

What about some (programming) jokes for a smooth beginning of a new year? Let's start with an old one:

How many software developers does it take to change a lightbulb? 10 to discuss the requirements, 10 more to do the analysis, 10 more to do the design, and one to write the code, 12 years later.

Well, that's definitely a "waterfall-model" one! Do you know some XP-jokes? I don't think there are any, as Agility (with the capital A!) is much to cool nowadays to be joked about ;-)! So, as not to let you think I'm a hopeless oldtimer, here is some more modern one, actually a cartoon* :

Well, a discussion could begin about Java, its low-level interfaces, its megatons of frameworks, etc... but not this time.

And here's another one, this time more higher-order and functional (Haskell, if I'm right)**:

Isn't it cute?

And, at last, hava a look at a day in programmers life: http://www.muza.pl/7001.html?cc=0.6113369317218645&mode=image&img=0#gallery. It's really hard sometimes!!!


PS: If you know some XP or Agile jokes, please let me know!

---
* sorry, don't remember the source :-((
** source: http://arcanux.org/lambdacats.html, thanks to Philip Wadler ;-)

Some plans, or what's to be expected

...from this blog? As this blog is stalling a bit recently (I began several articles in parallel and they are each in a different phase of completion) I felt like it would be a good idea to reinstate the purpose of this blog. For me: to motivate myself to complete at last some of the most promising articles, and for my readers (yes, don't laugh, I know that nread >= 1!): to get some perspective if it'd worth reading this blog for the next time.

When I started, I had two purposes on my mind:

1. to write about some of my technical work which I found interesting
2. to give some interesting vistas on some general topics in SW developement - provided I can find some ;-)

So you can see this blog wasn't intended as uncoordinated blatherings, but rather a limited collection of articles: I simply haven't done that many interesting things or found that many new ideas. This can be explained by the fact that this blog is a sort of replacement for my old, nonfunctional, dilapidated homepage, which I really should update sometimes soon. But these days starting a blog is much simpler than re-working an old homepage (it's Web 2.0 now!). So let's extemporize a list of topics I've got in the pipeline:

1. Technical topics

• design and implementation of my own small lambda expression library in C++ (as it was fun)
• modal logic and tesing of multithreaded application (as it shows the limits of knowledge)
• using lock-free synchronization (as C++ programmers always worry about performance, maybe to much?)
• subtle Java vs C++ differences (as I like language-design discusssions)

2. General SW-engineering topics

• why is everybody keen on scripting languages (sociology applied ;-)
• Python's language design (coming to terms with Python hype)
• waterfall and XP methods (a somewhat different comparision)
• web services, SOAP an the (r)REST
• does speed really kill in SW-engineering?
• the new antipattern (some ruminations on singletons)
• C++ myths in the Java community (as most of the Java people know C++ only from fairy tales, I think)
• from DLL to XML hell (sometimes it must be a rant)
• Idiot's sorts (I mean sort algorithms...)

etc...

OK, let's get real. I'd be happy to complete the blogs on the three first topics from the list 1. and the four first topics from the list 2. In addition I'll sometimes do a "follow up" on some earlier blog entry. The one I must definitely write is a follow-up on the "Google Solvers"* blog: there is defintely something that has to be added to that one! Sometimes I'll simply extend some older article if it isn't too long, for example the "iPhone presentation"** blog: at the time of its writing I purposely omitted examining any of my guesses, now it's time to compare my intuitions with reality. And there are some other topics I've forgotten, but I may remember again sometime. As my distinguished colleague Stefan Z.* would say "Software engineering is like war, ...", so I'll keep on fighting.

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* http://ib-krajewski.blogspot.com/2007/07/google-solvers.html
** http://ib-krajewski.blogspot.com/2007/08/iphone-presentation-with-afterthoughts.html

intro

Hi!

This will be my technical blog: I hope to be able to share a couple of thoughs on software and programming languages (hence the unimaginative title) in rather an irregular manner. This blog is related to my freelancing work done under the name http://www.ib-krajewski.de/ in Munich, Germany.

I'm in first line a C++ kind of a guy: doing it for a quite long time and liking it rather well. But as my interest lies in the technology rather than in evangelism, I was as well enjoing (or not) programming in Java, Perl, Python and some other less known languages (you're right, Ruby is not on the list). Technologically I come from academia and the research on distributed systems and networks, later enhanced with network management, client-server systems, and somentimes even web applications. I liked designing frameworks for other people and objects for my own systems. I hope I'll be able to say something new about languages, programming and aestetics, but it may as well degenate into rants... So be forewarned!

Marek