Bob Trower

I am a 'computer guy' who has been around a long time. I have written a lot of stuff in Cyberspace, but have only recently decided to give up completely on the notion of privacy. For the most part, I will be posting as myself just about everywhere. However, I am a very strong believer that people should generally use vested anonymous handles as a matter of course. I am sure I write about that at length somewhere, but if you need elaboration, feel free to get in touch.

You can find out more about me than you likely wish to here:

http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?BobTrower

Bob, Thank you for introducing yourself. If you look at my homepage you will see that I have been wandering around on this wiki for a long time. In my experience there is room for a lot of discussion on a lot of programming topics. I have been contributing and learning on many different topics, and find the most interesting thing to be the cross linking between different ideas. -- JohnFletcher

John -- Thanks. I was going to put this on *your* page, but it would get lost. That is one big page. I confess that I should know "who's who' on this wiki a lot better. I have been lurking here (well, posting anonymously) for many years. However, I don't generally see these things as 'social' per se and hence do not spend much time 'making nice'. I suppose I should. BTW -- Even though I have not put that stuff down, I am quite interested in most of what I saw as I skimmed through your page. The other stuff I put up recently (logging, methodology) comes from funded research work I do that touches on a lot of esoteric stuff.

Bob, I was very interested in the number of links I was able to find to other pages on logging, and create a category for it. What starts for me as a tidying activity, usually ends with some understanding I didn't have before. My homepage is a bit of a mess. A lot of the dialog happened some years ago now, but the most useful part is the collections of links, in case I forget them. -- John

John -- I have a number of things that touch upon not just logging, but all of the things required to justify, design, develop, build, deploy and ultimately retire software. I also have a specialty interest in something I call 'data packaging'. That is where the rubber hits the road and I can tell you that as complicated as I make it sound on this wiki, the deployment of stable working production software is decidedly non-trivial and even I am glossing details.

As an aside, there is a crazy argument elsewhere, I think on this wiki, where people are arguing in favor of using asserts in shipping code. I'm too lazy to look right now, but I think that you or someone else I am familiar with may have actually started it (the person who started it was on my side -- against). No doubt the people arguing in favor of the use of asserts are arguing against the use of logging. Oh my. Somewhere, I have a skeleton of a program demonstrating the minimal use of logging. I am strongly thinking of showing the two cases -- catastrophic failure on an assertion vs graceful shutdown and ultimate recovery using logging to identify causes and fixes. If you read this, perhaps you (or someone who thinks asserts make sense) can find me a plausible use of an assert statement within actual code. I can then use that as my example of both how not to code (using that assertion) vs how to code in a better way. It is easy to come up with examples of asserts causing disaster. However, it seems impossible to come up with even an abstract case where asserts make sense. --- BobTrower

My apologies that I have missed this remark addressed to me. I cannot recall what you are talking about and have had a look without any success. Can you point me to the discussion you are thinking of? -- JohnFletcher

John -- Sorry about that, it was another 'John'. The page in question is here:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DoNotUseAssertions

--- BobTrower

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