Category Archives: Design

The End of OS X

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Today I read The End of OS X. I particularly liked the bit about the Unix philosophy:

  1. Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new “features”.
  2. Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don’t clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don’t insist on interactive input.
  3. Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don’t hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.
  4. Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task, even if you have to detour to build the tools and expect to throw some of them out after you’ve finished using them.

HTML forms

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Found a cool series of articles: How to Build HTML Forms Right. Only the first two of five articles have been published so far, but I’m looking forward to the next three. The articles are about how to do forms right in HTML 5.

The articles are rich with links, click through for heaps of info. Some things that I found:

C++ Virtual Destructors and Base Classes

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I’ve been wondering what happens when a derived class defines a virtual destructor. What about its base destructors? Are they called? If so, when? I finally read the right paragraph in The C++ Programming Language (pg 70):

A virtual destructor is essential for an abstract class because an object of a derived class is usually manipulated through a pointer to a base class. Then, the virtual function call mechanism ensures that the proper destructor is called. That destructor then implicitly invokes the destructors of its bases and members.

Still not sure when the bases and members are destructed, presumably after the derived virtual destructor…