Re: [PATCH] fix threaded grep for machines with only one cpu

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 16, 2010, 22:54 UTC
Message-ID: <7v1vgk94gq.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.2.00.1002161606570.1946@xanadu.home>

Nicolas Pitre <nico@fluxnic.net> writes:

Show 12 quoted lines

> On Tue, 16 Feb 2010, Heiko Voigt wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 03:00:47PM -0500, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
>> > What do you expect from academia?  School and real life are still too 
>> > often disconnected.
>> 
>> If you want to offend people that try to help out in real life. This is
>> exactly the kind of comment that does it.
>
> Because you think that I'm not giving my own time helping people solving 
> real life issues? If so I'd suggest you do a quick background check on 
> myself.

I don't think Heiko is saying he was offended by you, but is saying he was offended by me saying "Don't they teach this in schools anymore?" I was simply curious about the answer to that question. If they don't teach C, it is not Heiko's fault---no need to get offended. I admit that I did go "Huh? Never repeat? What's the point?" when I first saw the idiom.

By learning and sticking to idioms people get more efficient, because there is no need to think if it is better to have "do { ... } while()" inside or outside yourself; cleverer people have already figured out the best way and that is how idioms came about. Once you learn them, your eyes will coast over the outer cruft and focus on the essential part of the macro "..." without even spending any extra effort to actively squelch the surrounding "do {" and "} while (0)". These literally become part of background noise and do not bother you anymore to the point that they are not even ugly.

Think of this as a mutual/collective learning experience. As Dscho said on this topic on msysgit list, Heiko _is_ the hero in figuring out what was originally broken, even though the proposed solution might have been suboptimal. I know figuring out what is broken have taken a lot more effort than my looking over his solution and reaching a better solution. Correct diagnosis is often more than 80% of solving a problem.