Re: [Algorithms] How to get 3dvector largest coordinate index?

[Bert P. <be...@bp...>]

Gino van den Bergen schreef:
> The whole "union is 
> considered harmful" debate seems to be a mostly religious one.

Well, I agree, and some leeway is certainly necessary in everyday
work just to get the job done.  Pressing hard for 100% compliant
code stops being productive at some point.

Nonetheless, a reason it's so easy to get upset over this, is that
there is definitely a slippery slope risk here.  If you set out to
write 100% bug-free code, then anybody with more than 1 week
experience will quickly realize that this is a dream and at best you
can hope for, say, 90% bug-free code.  However, if you accept this
from the start and set out to write 90% bug free code, you'll end up
with something that's 50% bugfree, just because people cut corners
and shuffle things under the carpet as "belonging to that shady 10%",
and it adds up.  It's a mentality shift, from aiming for perfection
and getting a little nervous when you cheat, to accepting cheating
as inherent to regular production, and off we all go.

I can certainly see how openly telling a team that it's okay to use
nonstandard practices if "they seem to work everywhere" may lead to a
situation where everybody is contributing code in what is essentially
their own personal approximation of c++.  We don't need that in an
industry that considers const correctness and /W4 -Wall clean code
as 'exotic' or 'unrealistic'.


end rant :)

bert