Wacky Ideas

Breaking Liskov

By jonskeet

Very recently, Barbara Liskov won the Turing award, which makes it a highly appropriate time to ponder when it’s reasonable to ignore her most famous piece of work, the Liskov Substitution (or Substitutability) Principle. This is not idle speculation: I’ve had a feature request for MiscUtil. The request makes sense, simplifies the code, and is good all round – but it breaks substitutability and documented APIs. The substitutability principle is in some ways just common sense. It says (in paraphrase) that if your code works for some base type T, it should be able to work with subtype of T, … Continue reading Breaking Liskov

RFID: What I really want it for

By jonskeet

This isn’t really coding related, but it’s technology related at least. There’s been a lot of fuss made about how great or awful RFID is and will be in the future, in terms of usefuless and privacy invasion respectively. There’s one use which I haven’t seen discussed, but which seems pretty obvious to me – but with further enhancements available. Basically, I want RFID on clothes to tell me useful stuff. Suppose each item of clothing were uniquely tagged, and you had a bunch of scanners in your home linked up to one system which stored metadata about the clothes. … Continue reading RFID: What I really want it for

Quick rant: why isn’t there an Exception(string, params object[]) constructor?

By jonskeet

This Stack Overflow question has reminded me of something I often wish existed in common exception constructors – an overload taking a format string and values. For instance, it would be really nice to be able to write: throw new IOException(“Expected to read {0} bytes but only {1} were available”,                      requiredSize, bytesRead); Of course, with no way of explicitly inheriting constructors (which I almost always want for exceptions, and almost never want for anything else) it would mean yet another overload to copy and paste from another exception, but the times when I’ve actually written it in my own exceptions it’s … Continue reading Quick rant: why isn’t there an Exception(string, params object[]) constructor?

Horrible grotty hack: returning an anonymous type instance

By jonskeet

One of the reasons I don’t view anonymous types as being too bad is that they’re nicely confined to methods. You can’t declare the type that you’re returning from a method if it’s anonymous (or if one of its type arguments is generic, e.g. a List<T> where T is an anonymous type and T isn’t a type parameter to the method itself). However, you can get around this if you’re sneaky. I’ve always known that it’s perfectly easy to return an instance of an anonymous type by declaring that the method will return object. However, it hadn’t occurred to me … Continue reading Horrible grotty hack: returning an anonymous type instance

Value types and parameterless constructors

By jonskeet

There have been a couple of questions on StackOverflow about value types and parameterless constructors: Structure vs Class in C# Why can’t I define a default constructor for a struct in .NET I learned quite a bit when answering both of these. When a further question about the default value of a type (particularly with respect to generics) came up, I thought it would be worth delving into a bit more depth. Very little of this is actually relevant most of the time, but it’s interesting nonetheless. I won’t go over most of the details I discovered in my answer … Continue reading Value types and parameterless constructors

Redesigning System.Object/java.lang.Object

By jonskeet

I’ve had quite a few discussions with a colleague about some failures of Java and .NET. The issue we keep coming back to is the root of the inheritance tree. There’s no doubt in my mind that having a tree with a single top-level class is a good thing, but it’s grown a bit too big for its boots. Pretty much everything in this post applies to both .NET and Java, sometimes with a few small changes. Where it might be unclear, I’ll point out the changes explicitly – otherwise I’ll just use the .NET terminology. What’s in System.Object? Before … Continue reading Redesigning System.Object/java.lang.Object

Jaffa bugs

By jonskeet

Currently I’m working on a problem found by one of our testers. Unfortunately, it’s hard to reproduce. Inspired by the fact that yesterday our micro-kitchen had jaffa cakes in, I propose that if we’re going to be frustrated by bugs like this, we might as well at least mock them. I propose that we call them jaffa bugs, and will work hard to promote this jargon until it takes over the world. Insert evil laugh here. (Just in case the etymology here isn’t clear, see the Wikipedia “Only Fools and Horses” entry.)

C# 4.0: dynamic<T> ?

By jonskeet

I’ve not played with the VS2010 CTP much yet, and I’ve only looked briefly at the documentation and blogs about the new C# 4.0 dynamic type, but a thought occurred to me: why not have the option of making it generic as a way of saying “I will dynamically support this set of operations”? As an example of what I mean, suppose you have an interface IMessageRouter like this: public interface IMessageRouter{    void Send(string message, string destination);} (This is an arbitrary example, by the way. The idea isn’t specifically more suitable for message routing than anything else.) I may have various … Continue reading C# 4.0: dynamic<T> ?

I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Cluestick

By jonskeet

Unless you’ve listened to I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue, the BBC Radio 4 “antidote to panel games” which was chaired by the recently departed (and much missed) Humphrey Lyttelton, this post may not make a lot of sense to you. That’s not intended to guarantee that it’ll make any sense to you even if you have listened to it, mind you. ISIHAC was full of very silly improvisation games. I was listening to an episode last night, and thought a developer version could be equally silly. Games played might include the following: (links show the Wikipedia description of the … Continue reading I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Cluestick

Mandelbrot revisited – benchmark edition

By jonskeet

I’ve had fun with the Mandelbrot set in this blog before, using it as an example of an embarrassingly parallelisable problem and demonstrating Parallel LINQ with it. This morning, over breakfast, I described the problem to Christian Brunschen, a colleague of mine who has some parallelisation experience through implementing OpenMP in a portable manner. He immediately suggested a few possible changes to the way that I’ve approached things. Given the number of different attempts I’ve now had, I thought it would make sense to write a litte benchmarking app which could easily be expanded as further implementations were considered. The … Continue reading Mandelbrot revisited – benchmark edition