The "too small to fail" memory-allocation rule

Posted Dec 31, 2014 2:23 UTC (Wed) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446)
Parent article: The "too small to fail" memory-allocation rule

I rather enjoyed reading the comments here. I have my own views, as a sysadmin, on the finer points of programming constructs ...

Many here are experts in some way or another. Some are regarded as de-facto experts by most of their peers. I think we might all learn by listening even when the speaker is clearly wrong by our own measure.

This article was about long held assumptions being shown to not be quite right and that seems somehow appropriate in the comments final analysis.

Cheers
Jon

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The "too small to fail" memory-allocation rule

Posted Dec 31, 2014 8:50 UTC (Wed) by cyronin (subscriber, #99592) [Link] (3 responses)

I feel like this is a nice analysis of this page. while the goto versus do-break-while() discussion seemed frustratingly pointless and off topic, I gained a refreshing insight of the rationale behind coding style decisions that you don't often see in coding style documentation.

I've often been told that the best way to learn something is to assert the wrong thing to experts, and they will give a clearer rationale on that topic than you will ever get from any other source. As a bonus, you might even cause a previously unnoticed rational inconsistency to become obvious, via the rubber duck effect.

The "too small to fail" memory-allocation rule

Posted Jan 1, 2015 1:05 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I've often been told that the best way to learn something is to assert the wrong thing to experts, and they will give a clearer rationale on that topic than you will ever get from any other source.

It's even better if you can manage to accidentally manage this trick when your interlocutor is the original inventor of whatever-it-is. Particularly if you didn't realise it. (This was much easier before the days of web search engines, but if you don't think to check it can happen these days too.)

It's a highly efficient way to become rapidly convinced that you are still below the Dunning-Kruger bound on whatever it is. :)

(I have, of course, been there. More than once...)

The "too small to fail" memory-allocation rule

Posted Jan 1, 2015 21:16 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link] (1 responses)

> I've often been told that the best way to learn something is to assert the wrong thing to experts, and they will give a clearer rationale on that topic than you will ever get from any other source.

This may be true but to do it on purpose only wastes the expert's time and make them stop wanting to talk to anyone.

In my opinion this is why discussions on comp.lang.c eventually turned every thread into "Read the FAQ" and for a while StackOverflow every new question was turned into a duplicate, until it became too much work to even find the duplicate for each stupid question and now the site is mostly junk. In my opinion.

The "too small to fail" memory-allocation rule

Posted Jan 2, 2015 3:12 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> and now the site is mostly junk

Who reads the entire site and cares?