Published on December 14, 2005
in general.
Tough some of these animations are a little bit “too professional” considering the problems they show, I’ve added a link to GapMinder presentations of the UN Human Development Trend statistics for this year (also in my del.icio.us)
Just this week I was having conversations about this… how come we still don’t realize how lucky we are for being born in a place with a relatively high income & a good health system? How is it that even tough we have everything so easy, instead of trying to help others we prefer to worry about which of the participants on Big Brother we want to leave the house? Don’t we see there are better things to spend our time on?
I think the main reason for this type of blindness is brainwashi… err, I mean educational… you can draw your own conclusions
Today on a discussion about C vs C++ vs C# vs anything else in the world (quite typical among programmers) somebody introduced a C idiom completely unknown to me: the Duff’s device.
Please take some minutes to behold this impressive piece of thinking in code either in Google Groups, in this comment from the author or in the Wikipedia entry (it will take some 30 minutes to actually study it in depth)
Ok, actually you might even found curious what the discussion was about: for C# programmers, you know about the mandatory break; after a switch case that the compiler does not allow you to omit. Well, this is a life-saver against unwanted program flow for fallthroughs in a break, but it does not let you do things like… like Duff’s device!
With great power comes great responsibility, so they say, and after all, as pointed out in literature, like “Expert C programming: Deep C Secrets” (very reccommended book!) default fallthrough in C is wrong 97% of the time!
