Isn't it funny how you progress as a programmer? I often look at code I wrote a year ago, or even six months ago, and say to myself, "What was I thinking here?" or, "Why didn't I do it *this* way?". I guess that's a good thing - it means I'm getting better as I go (I hope).
Today I learned how to dup a filehandle (specifically STDOUT, STDIN, STDERR). Laugh all you want, I just never needed or wanted to do it until now. I mean, I've open'ed up STDOUT to /dev/null plenty of times, but today I finally got fed up with debug output going to the log file instead of the screen and decided to do something about it. Worked like a charm. Easy, too. I suspect there are lots of *easy* things that I've just never had the need or desire to test or try.
Last night I woke up again in the middle of the night and decided to kill some time by reading a bit of "C++ Primer Plus", published by The Waite Groupe. Now, it's been a long time since I looked at C++, but as I read over it I realized a few things:
In another way, of course, it's a good sign. Means you're picking up on things naturally that you hadn't noticed before.
As for the typing thing...it bothers me that German has gender-specific pronouns. Does it bother me so much I can't understand German? Nope. Am I still going to learn it, even though it feels vastly inferior to English? Sure. It's got its good points. (Anybody want to tell me them, please, go right ahead...
Could be worse. Had you never written that code, you probably wouldn't be at the point where you can realize it's not great code.
