

Brian Kernighan on The Elements of Programming Style[video] - b-man
http://video.ias.edu/PiTP2009-Kernighan

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tarkin2
A fairly minor point of the video, but interesting for me, was when he spoke
about paranoia and bound checking. I often cannot decide if I should check if
strings are NULL, numbers are negative, files are open/closed, etc, etc. I'm
often unsure if I should spend, often long stretches of, time worrying about
every possible boundary condition of all my variables, which is no simple task
when dealing with constructs more complex than integers. When I do this it
becomes apparent my functions are getting larger and larger, however; more
return values, more if clauses, etc, etc. He offers no solution, but suggests
there's a tradeoff, which is strangely reassuring. The problem doesn't make me
feel so bad, now I hear that from him. More and more I'm coming to the
conclusion it's best to transfer all that checking to a wrapper function, or
leave it to the function's user, which will have to become, in effect, the
wrapper function.

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_prototype_
For those you who are nerdy enough like myself: if you stick around for the
better part of the end, there a funny moment in which a buzzer goes off, and
Brian shake like a female dog. I love the man, but that was unexpectedly
hilarious. Hahaha

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jhg
A louder version with actual slide content would be nice.

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cubedice
Well, about 4 or 5 minutes in they switch to a PIP view, with the majority of
the screen showing the slides.

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jemfinch
Warning: at 56 minutes or so a fire alarm goes off. You probably want to turn
your volume down to compensate.

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avolkov
is there slides anywhere?

