On 9 February human error resulted in 11 deaths and 80 further casualties in tragic wreck near Bad Aibling, Germany. Despite a supposedly robust safety system, a lone operator was capable of […]
How blaming the user leads to tragedy
API forensics for iOS system time: missing documentation
I started using the mach_absolute_time function on iOS to get proper event timing information. It works well, I think; the problem is that I actually don’t know what this function is supposed […]
The trouble with `floor` and `ceil`
floor and ceil have the bad habit of producing unexpected results. They aren’t broken, but in light of floating point nasties can often result in a number that’s ±1 of the desired […]
Implementing a Swipe gesture
I recently implemented a swipe gesture for Fuse. The gesture recognition itself, though complex, was not hard to implement; I had most of the needed pieces already. Designing a user friendly, declarative […]
The hard part of error handling is not the error itself
Are our discussions about errors focusing on the right part of the problem? We tend to argue about what exceptions mean, or how return values are messy. But if I look at […]
Why don’t we have runtime virtual dispatching?
Virtual functions are a great feature, but they have a rather severe limitation. They can only be implemented by extending the definition of all classes involved. A lot of operations on classes […]
Everything can and will go wrong: all functions fail
In a dreamy programming utopia, functions behave correctly and nothing unexpected ever happens. In technical reality however even the most mundane of actions can suffer failures and errors. It’s a misguided notion […]
The exceptional myth of non-local flow
“Exceptions are bad because they introduce non-local flow into a program.” It’s an argument I’ve seen often and it even came up in the comments in my previous article. It’s nonsense though. […]
Messy error handling in Rust with `try!`
I just read the documentation for std::result in Rust. A friend had pointed it out and said it left a sour taste in his mouth, as it does mine. These are essentially […]
Adding the first type expression to Leaf: type_infer
I’ve added the ability to type a variable based on an expression. The type_infer type operator resolves to the type of the provided expression — a useful feature for parametrics. Though not […]
Defects allowed by imprecise access modifiers
I recently fixed a defect that I felt the compiler could have caught. Some initialization code was not being run as I was calling a protected function instead of the correct public […]
Robot journalist predicts programmers will be obsoleted
Am I, as a programmer, in danger of being obsoleted by a program of my own creation? A recent BBC article gives programmers an 8% chance of being automated, whereas an NPR […]
The curse of varargs
Unexpectedly I needed to add support for variable argument functions to Leaf long before I intended to. I just wanted to print out a value, but it turns out that the standard […]
Reusing existing test suites for new features
Redundancy is one of the biggest sources of problems on any project, especially in tests. Having an unmaintainable test suite is in nobody’s interest. Eliminating redundant code is one of those things […]
