Chris Dragan's Corner

We’re witnessing our civilization undergo another significant revolution. We’re departing from extracting energy from fossil fuels in favor of harvesting energy from renewable sources. Majority of “clean energy” solutions rely on storing energy in batteries.

Car manufacturers are slowly transitioning to electric cars. Yet a few biggest ships create more pollution than all the cars in the world. To remedy this, Rolls-Royce (the engine company, not the luxury car company) announced a new battery system for ships. Eventually, in a few decades, we will produce a few orders of magnitude more batteries than today to store energy in cars, ships and houses.

The transition to electric engines and renewable energy is great for our planet, still one problems remains to be solved: batteries have limited lifetime. What is going to happen with all the mountains of batteries we will produce to replace dirty combustion engines?

One researcher developed a way to recycle used Li-Ion batteries. Reportedly around 97% of Li-Ion batteries end up piling up in landfills, which would become a huge problem in a few decades.

Should the cost of recycling batteries be included in the price of new products?

Today is one of those days when C++ surprises me. Here is a snippet:

#include <stdint.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
    const int64_t a = 3;
    if (a < -0x80000000)
        printf("%lld is negative\n", a);
    return 0;
}

This time the surprise comes from the intricacies of the C type system.

Hint: -0x80000000 is mathematically INT_MIN.

In case you’re wondering, it is not about improving the above snippet. It is about actually seeing a piece of code like this in the wild. It looks correct. But it is incorrect.

If you have some spare time and want to learn another language, I recommend Polish. Polish is a lot of fun! For a start, here are a few words in Polish and their meaning in English:

Enjoy!

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to keep this blog more active. While my activity has been low during the year 2015, I have not abandoned the blog. I was simply spending most of my free time working on my personal project. In the mean time I’ve gathered several ideas for new posts, it will be great if these posts finally see the daylight this year!

Hopefully my personal project will also reach a publishable state this year. Here’s an interesting detail about this project.

C++ has been the primary programming language for me in my professional career. Over the years, I’ve used many programming paradigms provided by this versatile language. However, to the surprise of many, my new project is currently written in pure C!

Why C? Out of admiration for a coworker, who writes programs in C, which are of high quality, and which are readable, maintainable and extensible. And also as a personal challenge. Writing *good* quality software in C requires more skills than in C++, because the language is much simpler and doesn’t have mechanisms provided by C++, which help avoid certain classes of bugs. To be fair, I’ve seen a lot of bad C++ source code which fails to use these mechanisms, but that’s another story.

So here are my impressions about going back to C so far. First of all, RAII, which is the cornerstone of C++, is not available. This makes cleanup more tedious. Again to be fair, C++98 without lambdas also makes cleanup more tedious by requiring you to write or use classes just for the purpose of cleanup, which makes the code scattered or complicated. Secondly, handling error conditions in C is more tedious. Exceptions in C++ can provide a great way of signaling exceptional errors, if used carefully(!), together with RAII, which makes returning from functions easier without the need to babysit allocated resources. Mildly missed are classes, which can help to logically organize functions, although in many C++ programs they are abused by implementing unnecessary OO designs, which lead to too much boiler plate code and eventually hamper readability. One of the most missed features are container templates, which greatly simplify memory management in C++.

On the bright side, some of the advantages include better portability due to unencumbered linkage. Because the language is so simple, it also leads to simpler code, which can in turn be easier to read, maintain and extend, contingent on the type of program and the way in which it is written, of course!

Surprisingly, it is possible to write readable code in C without drowning it in macros! Many C projects I’ve seen overflow with macros, which impact readability. But this can be said about C++ projects, too.

Now back to the editor. Let us see what the New Year brings!

Big Data says, that employees who use a non-default browser, such as Firefox or Chrome, stay with the job 15% longer than those using a default browser, such as IE or Safari.

Well, if Big Data says it, it must be true!

(There – I finally said it. 😉

We’re trying to avoid cursing at home as much as possible and so far our children did not pick up any curse words.

But for some time now our three-year old son has been using the word “poop” quite often. He finds it very amusing. I think it all started when our kids were practicing joking and this word was said in an innocuous,  funny context. He picked it up and it stuck.

Now he’s using it often at numerous occasions. Sometimes to get attention. Sometimes to make people laugh. And sometimes when he’s angry. Especially when he has to do something he does not want to or when he’s punished. Then he repeats or exclaims it multiple times, or says “you are a poop!”.

Because he hasn’t been exposed to cursing before, I think he invented cursing on his own. Cursing is apparently natural and as some studies indicate, brings relief in some situations, e.g. reduces pain.

Interestingly we’ve never had such problem with our daughter. This is one of the many examples we’ve noticed of the differences between males and females.