Die, You Gravy Sucking Pig Dog

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001211.html

by bdfh42 • 18 years ago

7 24 18 years ago

bdfh42• 18 years ago

With regard to:

sqlConnection.Close(); sqlConnection.Dispose(); sqlConnection = null;

The irony is that the .NET Framework and it's compilers are very good at optimisation and will almost certainly make the object available for garbage collection at the first opportunity - with a good chance that the second two statements would not even make it into the assembly.

statictype5• 18 years ago

I haven't dealt with this stuff in some time, but I recall that those last two statements are actually needed. I think it was a work-around for a bug\design-flaw in the earlier .NET garbage collector.

That last bit on explicitly assigning to null was really weird but in some cases, necessary.

lucraft• 18 years ago

I like Gravy.

diN0bot• 18 years ago

I like Dog.

lbrandy3• 18 years ago

> "In the C programming language, you're regularly forced to deal with the painful, dangerous concepts of pointers and explicit memory allocation. "

> "I'd wager the majority of programmers alive today have never once worried about malloc(). I call this progress..."

Anger. Must... resist... anger.

I've come to believe that Jeff Atwood is on a personal mission sent by God himself to piss me off.

Just remember, Jeff: every time you fire up that pretty C# code of yours, and make all your little variables through your ORM, letting the garbage collector clean up the mess you've made and then proceed to pump out those cute little web pages through your cute little templating language, to be sent off to some other computer through some magic wire to some magic browser to be rendered... that thousands and thousands of programmers (who, it should be noted, are almost all still alive, today) worrying about "dangerous" and "painful" concepts like pointers have slaved to make your silly little ORM, your database, your templating language, your network stack, your web browser, your web server, and your operating system.

As I've said before, some of us are in the trenches worrying about all the "dangerous" stuff, like pointers. The primary difference between you and I, though, is that I actually know you exist. I don't believe that at some point in the mid 80's, a network stack and a file system (each created in the "before time") really really loved each other and out popped a web server.

lliiffee• 18 years ago

I don't think he is saying pointers et al. aren't important. Consider the Whitehead quote: "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."

Even so, I imagine that most garbage collection proponents still think people should learn about pointers and GC, just not use them (unless there is a good reason to).

statictype5• 18 years ago

I know its somewhat trendy to pick on Jeff Atwood, but I don't really know what you're getting angry about.

He never said that malloc and free are irrelevant. And manual memory management is dangerous and painful. Anyone who's written a modicum of C would agree with that.

That a majority of programmers today don't have to worry about it is, in fact, progress.

lbrandy3• 18 years ago

> He never said that malloc and free are irrelevant.

It would be a good point if it was true.

Jeff's basically said as much going as far as calling C an "obsolete" language and saying it is not worth learning. He said he doesn't know C and sees no reason to learn it. Is that not the definition of calling malloc and free irrelevant?

DarkShikari3• 18 years ago

Anyone who's written a modicum of C would agree with that.

I've written tens of thousands of lines of C and maintain a codebase of over 50KLOC. I also am a somewhat less active maintainer on another project with almost 400KLOC. And I would strongly disagree with that, so you shouldn't make wide generalizations like "anyone."

I have devoted probably less than an hour of my time out of over a year of development on this codebase to memory management. I have never understood why people think it is so hard to call free() a couple times when your program shuts down.

At least in my experience, if you're finding memory management to be "hard", your program is structured in a bad way to begin with. Your program shouldn't be covered in mallocs and frees.

brl• 18 years ago

I estimate that I've written about half a million lines of C code and I will have to strongly disagree with that.

Manual memory management just isn't that much of a big deal once you are experienced enough with C to organize your software into modules (usually individual C files with one corresponding header file). You just encapsulate the creation and destruction of elaborate data structures so that it's easy to verify that everything is cleaned up correctly.

These days I program mostly in Java and I spend a lot more time tracking down memory leaks than I ever did while I was programming in C.

DanielBMarkham• 18 years ago

Okay! Okay!

It's killing me.

"Gravy Sucking" should be "Gravy-Sucking"

There.

I feel better now.

okeumeni• 18 years ago

This programmer shows a lot of temper; I won’t hire him.

I once worked with a guy from Ukraine who use to swear in his native language at office, trust me it’s not nice. It’s disruptive and ultimately non productive for the programmer and others around.

barbie17• 18 years ago

This is perhaps one of the most astonishingly vacuous article I have ever read in my entire life. What was is about, exactly? A funny function name? Not to mention that 70% of it is quotes from other people. Pure link bait.

ejs• 18 years ago

Funny, after I moved from programming assembly to mostly C (on microcontrollers) I thought pointers and memory allocation were the neatest things. I guess it all depends on your perspective, write a few thousand lines of assembly on a chip with 256 bytes of ram and pointers seem quite magical.

I also think Jeff doesn't realize just how many people out there still write code for small 8 and 16 bit processors, much of which is in C. Although I would not really recommend using malloc in most of those cases the "dangerous concepts of pointers" are still very alive and well.

Tichy• 18 years ago

I like to use the template pattern for that sql connection problem.

simplegeek2• 18 years ago

Let's just not say if he's right or wrong. But I don't think he went to a decent CS school, did he?

simplegeek2• 18 years ago

I mean I didn't mean any disrespect nor do I've any problems with this success. But at times he's just plain wrong. I mean others have said enough.

Die, You Gravy Sucking Pig Dog

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