Programmer Humor

38722 readers

40 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
No NSFW content.
Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.

founded 6 years ago

MODERATORS

cat_programmer@lemmy.ml

AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml

Low effort meme (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 month ago by voodooattack@lemmy.world to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml

11 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 3 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Thanks, that was a good read :)

However, my impression is that he's largely using the existence of templates and polymorphism as arguments that "we don't really care about type". I disagree: A template is essentially a generic type description that says something about what types are acceptable. When working with something polymorphic, I'll prefer ParentClass&, to indicate what kind of interface I'm working with.

Sure, it can be very useful to hide exact type information in order to generalise the code, but I think that's a weak argument for hiding all type information by default, which is what auto does.

[+] ugo@feddit.it 1 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 1 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

Similarly, what would you gain by saying uint32_t const* x = my_var.get<uint32_t>();

To be frank: You gain the information that MyConcreteType::get<uint32_t> returns a uint32_t, which I otherwise couldn't infer from the docs. Of course, I could assume it, based on the template parameter, but I don't want to go around assuming a bunch of stuff in order to read docs.

Take an example like auto x = my_var.to_reduced_form(), it's very clear that x is the "reduced form" of my_var, which could be meaningful in itself, but what type is it? I need to know that if I want to do anything with x. Can I do x += 1? If I do, will that modify my_var? Let's say I want to make a vector of whatever to_reduced_form returns... and so on.

All these questions are very easily answered by MyConcreteType x = my_var.to_reduced_form(). Now I immediately know that everything I can do with my_var, I can also do with x. This makes me happy, because I need to do less digging, and the code becomes clearer to read.