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What are we missing? Part 1

Posted on 2025-07-052025-07-05 by max Leave a Comment

I remember when I was (really) young, the excitement of the discovery when learning a programming language. It was BASIC first. That amazing feeling of being able to instruct a machine to execute your instructions and produce a visible result! Then came the mysterious Z80 assembly, with the incredible power of speed at the cost of long, tedious hours of hand-writing machine codes and the void sensation when the program just crashed with nothing but your brain to debug it.

A few years later, I was introduced to C. A shiny new world, where the promise of speed paired up with the ease of use (well, compared to hand-written assembly, it was easy indeed). And later on, C++. Up to this point, it seemed like a positive progression; each step had definitive advantages over the previous one, no regret or hesitation in jumping onto the new cart.

Professional Programmer

Posted on 2025-06-032025-06-05 by max Leave a Comment

And the next discussion topic was “Are you programmer professionals? And what does it mean?”

What promised to be a C++ meet-up about topics that could spark a flame war turned into a thought-provoking moment.

It started lightly with the east-const vs west-const question (obviously east-const is the right answer), then things got much more foundational.

Elf and Guards – Days 5 and 6

Posted on 2024-12-062024-12-07 by max Leave a Comment

It couldn’t last forever—spending consecutive days writing about my progress in the Advent of Code took too much time and the rest of my life knocked on the door. In this post, I will try to update you quickly on days five and six.

On day 5 we had to assist an unfortunate handbook printer to get the updated pages in the correct order. Being magic-elven stuff, the proper order is not the natural increasing order of integers, but a custom order defined by number pairs – e.g. 43|12 means that page 43 has to be followed immediately by page 12. But stuff is not that simple, the order relationship is not linear like a–b–c, but may branch, so to give you an idea, after a may come either b or d and then are both followed by c.

Finding XMAS – Day 4

Posted on 2024-12-042024-12-04 by max Leave a Comment

Day 4 of the Advent of Code presents you with two new puzzles based on the word search puzzle idea. For some reason, you are teleported to the Ceres Elven Station (that made an appearance in AoC 2019), but there’s nothing for you to see here (yet) – not even the chief historian we looking for. So a small elf asks for your help to solve her word search.

Being Xmas elves the word you have to look for is “XMAS”, it can be written straight or reverse and can be written in any direction left, up left, up, up right, right down right, down and down left.

Elves’ Programming Language – Day 3

Posted on 2024-12-032024-12-03 by max Leave a Comment

There are plenty of programming languages and, of course, Xmas elves have their own. Although your main goal is still to find the Chief Historian, we are now in a warehouse, historian minions are wandering around looking for their boss and we are tasked to fix the computer¹.

This puzzle seemed a bit easier than the first two days, but I found it somewhat underspecified. You have to scan a text for patterns like “mul(n,m)” with n and m integers. For each pattern multiply n by m and sum all the products together.

Elves’ Advent Quest – Day 2

Posted on 2024-12-022024-12-02 by max Leave a Comment

After warming up with the first day’s puzzle, here we are with the second day. The bar is still low, but not as low as yesterday. With the coordinates decoded in the last puzzle, everyone runs to the nearest location which happens to be a nuclear plant (for reindeer needs). While we are here the elves running the plant ask for your help to analyze some data looking for anomalies.

Yes, we are in a hurry to look for the chief historian elf, but we also have 25 days to fill with puzzles. So here we go.

Helping Elves One Star at a Time

Posted on 2024-12-012024-12-01 by max Leave a Comment

That period of the year has finally come. That cozy winter feeling of cold outside the window, while busy waiting for the holidays. As a long-standing tradition that started last year, this is the time I help Elves prepare for Xmas in the Advent of Code.

Each day of Advent, the Advent of Code, proposes a couple of puzzles that can be solved by writing some code. There are no constraints on the language or the approach since the result of the puzzle is an integer number. Also, there is no deadline, you can continue working on the puzzles after Xmas. And there is no prize, you just know you did the right thing helping the elves and Santa.

No Future for Us to C

Posted on 2024-11-012024-11-12 by max Leave a Comment

It has been a while since some official documents produced by the USA administration advised against using unsafe programming languages like C and C++ (yes, C and C++ are explicitly mentioned). Now, the news resurfaced on the web with an added deadline—manufacturers have until January 1, 2026, to create a memory-safe roadmap for existing applications.

Let’s have a look at the text:

Recommended action: Software manufacturers should build products in a manner that systematically prevents the introduction of memory safety vulnerabilities, such as by using a memory safe language or hardware capabilities that prevent memory safety vulnerabilities. Additionally, software manufacturers should publish a memory safety roadmap by January 1, 2026.

This is pretty strict, even if it is phrased with “should” and not “shall” or “must”. If you develop a new product, you’d better drop C or C++. Moreover, if you have an existing product written in one of these pesky languages, you should provide a roadmap to memory safety.

Lambda World 2024

Posted on 2024-10-272025-03-20 by max Leave a Comment

It was 2019 and nothing suggested that 2020 would not have been another regular year – another spring, another early bird ticket for the Lambda World conference, another regular summer, and then the most awaited conference of the year, a journey to Cadiz to attend Lambda World 2020.

Things went quite differently (for those reading from other planets – because of the pandemic) and the world was suddenly locked down, some conferences went online, and some were canceled, Lambda World included. Things went a bit better in 2021, but no news about a new edition of the functional programming conference. It was 2022, and many conferences had returned to the in-presence format, maybe with some precaution, but the worst part of the pandemic was finally over. Again no trace of Lambda World. 2023 came and went, and still no sign of lambda-life from Cadiz. Still vague or no answer to my emails to the organizing company.

And then suddenly and unexpectedly, the email popped up in my incoming folder – early bird ticket sale for Lambda World 2024 is open. I was so happy they were back, but at the same time I was about to change jobs and it was not the best approach to arrive on the first day at the new workplace and pretend to be sponsored to attend the conference. So, after a brief family check, I decided to self-sponsor my attendance and hope for at least some partial refund.

Fun with Functors in C

Posted on 2024-07-272024-07-27 by max Leave a Comment

C language is old, actually, a very old language that resisted all the innovations that impacted the software development industries. Even ISO standard Cobol integrated object-oriented capabilities in 2002!

This didn’t prevent programmers from applying object-oriented programming to C. With some macro juggling and a lot of self-control not to break framework rules, you can have inheritance and dynamic dispatching.

Generic programming is, in the same way, foreign to C language¹. You can use preprocessor macros to implement generic containers or functions that can be instantiated on the type you need, but it is a painful endeavor.

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