CppCon 2015: Sean Parent "Better Code: Data Structures"

Sean Parent "Better Code: Data Structures" (2015): ▶ this video I've been programming in C++ and using the STL for many years but this one really made me aware of what just might be the best way to think about it.

If anyone is interested in Type systems and what's a type, I highly recommend watching the first 20 mins of Sean Parent's presentation: ▶ this video It will change the way you think about types after this.

Reminds me of Sean Parent's recounting[1] of how his son's beads and string toy could represent a tree data structure with stateless traversal and some other interesting properties, like: > ...to erase elements from some point in my model to some other point in my model, what I do is grab those two locations on the string, and I pick the whole thing up, and the beads that fall off are the ones that get erased ... (48:41) 1: ▶ this video

I've been spending a few days going through talks from last years cppcon[1]. They're all good, but they've all left me with a strong desire for a strongly opinionated, there-is-no-past-only-the-future introduction to C++14 (and incidentally, C11). I've added a few of those talks I've watched and liked to a small playlist (with a couple of other talks on programming, unrelated - the relevant talks are prefixed with "cppcon 2015"): link The full cppcon playlist is here: link Of special relevance is the rather excellent talk by Kate Gregory on "Stop Teaching C" (when you're supposed to do an intro course to C++): "CppCon 2015: Kate Gregory “Stop Teaching C"": link (But again, I want an open wiki/live tutorial, along the lines of "How I start", but longer, which goes through all this stuff. We really should make one, both for C++14 and for C11). CppCon 2015: Herb Sutter "Writing Good C++14... By Default": link Is also rather uplifting, and: CppCon 2015: Sean Parent "Better Code: Data Structures": ▶ this video makes a pretty good case for simple, modern C++ being clear, easy and efficient. Finally, CppCon 2015: Phil Nash “Test Driven C++ with Catch”: link apart for being a pretty straight forward intro to a simple testing framework, appears to reveal some secrets combining template magic and still get sane compile times (hint: don't recompile more (template) code on every iteration than you need to). There's a couple of good ones that touch on meta-programming too (Look for t