• June's Overload Journal has been published.
  10 June 2021

  The June 2021 ACCU Overload journal has been published and should arrive at members' addresses in the next few days. Overload 163 and previous issues of Overload can be accessed via the Journals menu.

• ACCU Online: The ABC++ of Programming and Polymorphism
  10 May 2021

  

  ACCU 'local' online events is pleased to welcome Richard Park who will be telling us about A Programming Language and Phil Nash who will fill in languages from B to C - and beyond - while presenting 'Polymorphism À La Carte'

  The event will be hosted, virtually, on Remo. This will also give us the social and networking aspect of meet-ups that we miss from the in-person version.

  When: Thursday, 20th May 2021, 19:00 start.
  Duration: Around 2 hours.
  Where: A link to the event will be sent to those who RSVP as attending nearer the time.

  To attend: Please sign up on the ACCU London event page: https://www.meetup.com/ACCULondon/events/277980280

  Programme (times are approximate):

  19:00 Intro and News

  19:10 A Programming Language for Thinking about Algorithms - Richard Park

  Being able to code isn't enough. You have to be able to reason about your algorithms if you want to get them right. Just like the symbolic notation of traditional mathematics allows you to think about your formulas, so too, a programming language inspired by traditional mathematical notation can aid your thinking about problems and the code used to solve them.

  This session presents APL and its benefits for high-level development and comparison of algorithms, leading to an intuition about performance, for example in the context of memory access and amenability to GPU computing.

  20:00 Break

  20:15 Polymorphism À La Carte - Phil Nash

  If we've been using C++ family languages (including Java, C#, D etc) we may have a narrow idea of how polymorphism works. In this talk we'll present several different ways to do polymorphism, in a few different languages, along with their respective trade-offs, and conclude that, ideally, we'd have access to several approaches so we can pick the right one for the moment. Clojure does just that, coining the term Polymorphism À La Carte, and we'll hint at a C++ library that can do so, too. We'll do this in the context of the historical family tree of languages that C++ grew up in.

  21:00 Talks end -- socialising in Remo

  About the speakers:

  Richard Park works for Dyalog, a modern APL implementor, teaching both novices and more experienced users about traditional and modern APL.

  Phil Nash is the original author of the C++ test framework, Catch2, and composable command line parser, Clara. As Developer Advocate at JetBrains he's involved with CLion and ReSharper C++. He's also the organiser of C++ London and C++ on Sea, as well as co-host and producer of the cpp.chat podcast. More generally he's an advocate for good testing practices, TDD and using the type system and functional techniques to reduce complexity and increase correctness. He's previously worked in Finance and Mobile offers training and coaching in TDD for C++.

• May's C Vu Journal has been published.
  8 May 2021

  The May 2021 ACCU C Vu journal has been published and should arrive at members' addresses in the next few days. C Vu 33-2 and previous issues of C Vu can be accessed via the Journals menu (ACCU members only).

• April's Overload Journal has been published.
  13 April 2021

  The April 2021 ACCU Overload journal has been published and should arrive at members' addresses in the next few days. Overload 162 and previous issues of Overload can be accessed via the Journals menu.

• Videos from ACCU 2021 Online have been posted.
  6 April 2021

  Videos of sessions from the ACCU 2021 Online Conference have been posted to YouTube.

  Videos can be found on the ACCU YouTube page.

  Links to the videos can be found on the ACCU website under the Videos menu drop-down; the ACCU Conference Videos page; and on the archived conference schedule page.

Overload 163 · June 2021 (PDF)

Contents

• Geek, Nerd or Neither?.
  Typecasting can be useful but has many dangers. Frances Buontempo considers how to pick your way through categories.

• Replacing ‘bool’ Values.
  Booleans seem simple to use. Spencer Collyer considers when they can actually cause a world of pain.

• How We (Don’t) Reason About Code.
  Reading code is time consuming. Lucian Radu Teodorescu takes it one step further and asks how we reason about code.

• Out of Control.
  An essay on paradigms, refactoring, control flow, data, code, dualism and what Roman numerals ever did for us. Kevlin Henney takes us on a whirlwind tour.

• The Sea of C You Don’t Want to See.
  Last issue included a script. Deák Ferenc plays with the paradigm and dives into (a) deep sea (deap C).