97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

Chapter 51. Learn to Say, “Hello, World”

Thomas Guest

PAUL LEE, username leep, more commonly known as Hoppy, had a reputation as the local expert on programming issues. I needed help. I walked across to Hoppy’s desk and asked whether he could take a look at some code for me.

“Sure,” said Hoppy, “pull up a chair.” I took care not to topple the empty cola cans stacked in a pyramid behind him.

“What code?”

“In a function in a file,” I said.

“So, let’s take a look at this function.” Hoppy moved aside a copy of K&R and slid his keyboard in front of me.

“Where’s the IDE?” Apparently, Hoppy had no IDE running, just some editor that I couldn’t operate. He grabbed back the keyboard. A few keystrokes later, we had the file open—it was quite a big file—and were looking at the function—it was quite a big function. He paged down to the conditional block I wanted to ask about.

“What would this clause actually do if x is negative?” I asked. “Surely it’s wrong.”

I’d been trying all morning to find a way to force x to be negative, but the big function in the big file was part of a big project, and the cycle of recompiling and then rerunning my experiments was wearing me down. Couldn’t an expert like Hoppy just tell me the answer?

Hoppy admitted he wasn’t sure. To my surprise, he didn’t reach for K&R. Instead, he copied the code block into a new ...