Tag Archives: C++

Archive Journal Entry: 20030204

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I’ve been forced to work a little bit in C++ and my clearly articulated and carefully considered opinion: RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY!!!!! Okay, so this rant has probably been done to death but really, what’s up with virtual methods? What’s up with the really stupid syntax (:: just doens’t do anything for me!)? What’s up with the stupid reliance on preprocessor directives? What’s up with the lack of dynamic typing and reflection? What’s up with the hassle of separate .h files? What’s up with references????!!! Whoever thought this thing up must have been really really twisted! (And this corroborates that.)

Archive Journal Entry: 20021211

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O for a good UML modelling tool!!! I’ve tried the three common ones: Rational Rose, Together Control Center, and Microsoft Visio. They all basically suck (and that’s why I’m not linking to them). Time to start looking around for a better one… I’ve been busy creating the mother of all sequence diagrams at work. I’m using Visio for it. Visio is okay for most things, but if you need to resize the activation bar on a lifeline, everything gets screwed up. Additionally, Visio’s UML capabilities don’t seem to support conditional messages. There’s smaller irritants as well: resizing of UML diagram components is limited or non-existant (even with the update from M$), the attachement points are hard to use, the message arrow lines cannot be easily routed manually, and if a message arrow gets disconnected, it forgets what message it was calling. And that’s all just a rant about sequence diagrams!!!

Another work note: I’m trying to get Eclipse (my absolute most favorite Java IDE ever) to work with C and C++ on Windows. I installed Cygwin to see if that would help, but I’m having trouble figuring out how to get it to build a simple HelloWorld app. If I can get it working well with C and C++ it becomes a candidate to be the standard IDE here.

Last night I made a mistake when I bought supplemental groceries and the pharmacy: I got bread and honey. I’ve eaten 14 slices of bread with butter and honey in the last 24 hours. I think that’s about equivalent to 2000 Calories by itself. It’s just that it’s so darn yummy!!!

Melanie and Haifa are sick 🙁 I hope they feel better soon, but if they don’t, I kinda look forward to helping out at home this weekend. Melanie will get a couple meals in bed at least. She’s been reading the stories from the books of short stories I got her. One is a Philip K. Dick collection which includes the now well-known “Minority Report”. The other is a multi-author collection with selections from Stephen King, Orson Scott Card, Anne McCaffery, and others. I think she’s read two stories now. I wrote a card with the gift basically saying I hoped that she would be able to have a bit of a fantasy life. She’s so busy that she doesn’t have time really to read novels: they end up taking way too long. So short stories… we’ll see how it goes. If Melanie says the stories are good, I’ll put links to the books here.