denis bider

Wow. It's been a while since I've seen a more fragrant turd than the COM interface exposed by Excel which would, theoretically, allow you to interact with workbooks from e.g. PowerShell.

Theoretically is the key word, I'm sad to say. In practice, it's so buggy and poorly designed that you might save more time if you did what you wanted by hand.

Let's start with the simplest possible script:
  $xl = New-Object -com Excel.Application $wb = $xl.Workbooks.Open("C:\Temp\file.xls") What does this do?

Each invocation of this script creates a copy of Excel which then just hangs around. Indefinitely. Like this:


If you just created the COM object, Excel would exit. But since you opened a workbook, it does not. Not even closing the PowerShell window exits these instances. You have to actually go and kill them using a task manager application.

Okay. Let's try modifying the script to close the workbook:

  $xl = New-Object -com Excel.Application $wb = $xl.Wor…

Edit: Thanks to Drammon, Simon Brand, and Nicola Gigante for important corrections (see comments).

It's now in vogue to write C++ code like this:
autoconst& container = Function();for(autoconst& element : container){autoconst& member = element.AccessMember();...}const& is necessary because auto strips references and const/volatile qualifiers. This is good: it is apparent when you're not copying a whole object, even if its type is hidden from view.

But please don't do this (too much).

The value of strong typing in C++ is not only in ensuring consistency at compile-time, it's also to document what the code is doing.

The above snippet requires that the reader knows:
what Function returnswhat container.begin() or begin(container) returnswhat element.AccessMember() returnsin order to just know that the code is doing this:
  Container const& container = Function();for(Container::Element const& element : container){ Member const& member = elem…

In a nutshell: Terrorism and wars in the Middle East are not about Islam vs. the West. Instead, there cannot be peace in the Middle East as long as major world powers – the US and its allies on the one hand, and Russia on the other – have strong and opposite preferences about the price of oil; and of course, as long as the price is controlled by who has more influence over large oil producing countries.

It's easy to see ourselves as enlightened, and to perceive Middle Easterners as these backwards people with fundamentalist beliefs, who can't stop fighting each other and us, regardless of our "noble" attempts to "free" them. We try to "liberate" them from the Taliban, Hussein, and al-Assad – and they attack us!

Except we have never intervened in the Middle East to liberate; or to help build anyone's peaceful country. We only intervene to stir the shit, but secular values require peace to come about. As we stir shit, unrest and extremism prospe…

A few weeks ago, I was reviewing some code, and found something similar to this:
std::string host =...;int port =23;size_t pos = host.find(":");if(pos != host.npos){ port =atoi(host.substr(pos +1).c_str()); host = host.substr(0, pos);}Looks reasonable enough. This code parses a parameter in “host:port” format. It's perfectly decent where it appears. It will run rarely, once per process invocation, so performance is irrelevant. It’s an acceptable way to achieve what’s intended.

But suppose this code was in a tight inner loop. Suppose it was part of a parser that needs to digest hundreds of megabytes of data, and performance is relevant.

In that case, this code does two suboptimal things:
A heap allocation to copy the “port” portion of the string into. Why not just read the number from the original string?Another heap allocation to copy the “host” portion of the string. Again, why not just read from the original string?Seq as an improvement over std::string const…

There are smart people out there – people in many ways a lot like me, i.e. borderline idiot savants – who are attracted to the idea that the world needs to be saved through some kind of easy, adversarial revolution; rather than through a huge amount of incremental and cooperative effort. I suspect this is because cooperation seems boring; imposing one's will on others with violence seems fun; and plain old effort is hard and boring. Frequently, these are white middle-class Americans who do not recognize just how damn good they're having it, and how much worse things are in many other parts of the world.

Not in all parts for all things, of course. There are specific things that are genuinely better in other places. But overall, things are pretty great in the US for the middle and upper class. And yet, some of these same people can't stop going on about how awful everything is; and how everything could be much better if we just overthrew the entire system, and replaced it wi…