ericlippert

9 ms·

31.
by ericlippert 7y ago
The "malice" aspect is a great one and I did not go into that in this post because of course back in the 1990s we were not at all concerned that someone would maliciously craft inputs that would slow down this algorithm. In mode
32.
by ericlippert 7y ago
Hint: what is the correct behaviour of this method when given empty strings? Every string contains the empty string as a substring.
33.
by ericlippert 7y ago
There is a dereference past the bounds of the query in one case in the last code sample, but there is no deference beyond the bounds of the source string. You're probably thinking in C# or Java; remember that in C the convention is tha
34.
by ericlippert 7y ago
I take your point, but let's be fair. My attitude was "this code is bad and I'm going to demonstrate my skill by improving it" when it should have been "please teach me what design and implementation concerns went i
35.
by ericlippert 7y ago
My blog is about the design and implementation of programming languages; by understanding the causes of past mistakes we can learn to recognize them again today. The best mistakes to learn from are other people's!
36.
by ericlippert 7y ago
WOW. JUST... WOW. I will definitely try to remember that for next year!
37.
by ericlippert 7y ago
Sure, that's entirely possible. I'm curious to know if you knew from the moment of your birth that you should look at the operator table in this case, or if you learned that mitigation on a particular day. If the latter, what migh
38.
by ericlippert 7y ago
Though I get the humour and agree with the sentiment, the history of C tells us that a language can massively succeed even with constant "breaking changes". One of the things I learned working at Coverity is that there is no such
39.
by ericlippert 7y ago
It's rendered using the default WordPress theme ("Twenty Eleven") with the sole customization being that the body text colour is changed to purple. If it is rendering poorly, take it up with either WordPress or your browser p
40.
by ericlippert 7y ago
The problem is "mostly solved" by adding a warning to a single compiler? Sure, there are plenty of ways to mitigate the problem. That's not the point. The point is that the problem should not have arisen in the first place to
41.
by ericlippert 7y ago
Obviously yes, but that is question-begging. How does the novice programmer know that it is a good practice to use parentheses? x + y == z is correct, so it seems reasonable to conclude that x & y == z is also correct, particularly when
42.
by ericlippert 8y ago
And it's back. Thanks to Scott and Dan and all their colleagues for their prompt attention to this matter.
43.
by ericlippert 8y ago
I vividly remember the meeting I went to in 2003 with a bunch of Microsoft bloggers and lawyers -- it was one of the few times Raymond Chen and I were in the same room. :-) It was astonishing because of what the lawyers said: yes, it is a p
44.
by ericlippert 8y ago
I take your point, but VS twitter is this week running a series of short videos with Larry Osterman about how awesome COM is, which seems to argue against this theory. That said, lots of times Microsoft's left hand does not know what t
45.
by ericlippert 8y ago
Thanks Dan, much appreciated.
46.
by ericlippert 8y ago
Indeed, Scott has been thoroughly awesome today. :-)
47.
by ericlippert 8y ago
Thank you, that's a kind thing to say. I find that if I cannot explain a topic clearly to someone else, I probably don't understand it very well myself. :-)
48.
by ericlippert 8y ago
By a huge margin! And putting together that beginner course only took me a couple of months working in my spare time, and recording it only took a couple of days in O'Reilly's studio. I still edit my friend's programming book
49.
by ericlippert 8y ago
That's terrible. Those comments were alternately hilarious and informative.
50.
by ericlippert 8y ago
The reason for writing this is to gently introduce the general topic of improving how we represent stochastic workflows in mainstream programming languages. Entering that complex topic by exploring just how horrid even the most basic aspect
51.
by ericlippert 8y ago
One of the reasons I wrote this article was because of exactly the problem that you mention, so I am very happy that you found it interesting! I frequently interview recent CS graduates, and ask a technical question about techniques for re
52.
by ericlippert 8y ago
The point is to demonstrate the general truth that any method with a single recursion can be turned into a loop by making a series of small, safe program transformations. It is not intended to be a demonstration of a technique for writing m
53.
by ericlippert 8y ago
I discuss tail calls in part two. I am often surprised by the number of people who will criticize part one of an article for omitting certain details before reading the second part. Was "part one" unclear in some way?
54.
by ericlippert 8y ago
You are not the only one who thought that; see the comments to my post. As I note in part two, the point of the article was to show the general method; there are of course many ways to solve the original problem more efficiently. The spec
55.
by ericlippert 8y ago
That's correct. I'll discuss CPS in part two.
56.
by ericlippert 8y ago
My lips are sealed.
57.
by ericlippert 11y ago
Your assumption is pretty good! I won't use continued fractions directly but the Stern-Brocot tree method can be understood in terms of continued fractions.
58.
by ericlippert 11y ago
Yes. There are so many possible biases when interviewing and it is hard to keep them all in mind at once. The practice of science is essentially one long story about overcoming those human tendencies to arrive at the truth.
59.
by ericlippert 11y ago
No, because we are actually building telescopes here , and astronomy PhDs apply, and when they are not actually clear on the difference between a reflector and refractor telescope you realize, hey, this person is going to need to learn so
60.
by ericlippert 11y ago
The solution to this problem is to follow up the question with "oh, so you're an eight, great, what is something that a seven would have difficulty with?" Make them calibrate the scale for you.

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