Programming

I've been programming since the mid-90s, starting with QBasic, then moving on to Visual Basic, C++, C, and dabbling in assembly in college. Currently, my main languages are C++, C, and Python. I kind of hate where C++ is heading, with its over-reliance on the standard library and templates, and its increasingly weird syntax, but it is still the best tool for most jobs I encounter (in scientific computing). Python is fantastic for providing a frontend to low-level high-performance code, and C is a nice refreshing departure from high abstraction, and is the lingua franca among all languages and foreign function interfaces.

As far as the other languages, I can work with shell, Perl, Lua, Java, Mathematica, R, Matlab, and PostScript. I am intrigued by Rust. I had high hopes for Julia, but, alas, it uses 1-based indexing, and completely lacks the ability to do object-oriented programming with any reasonable syntax.

My C++ style guide:

1. Tabs, not spaces. All tabs must exist only at the beginning of a line, never proceeding a non-tab character. That is, all lines must match the regex

   ^\t*[^\t]*$

   . Changing tab width should never impact readability of the code, but I prefer 1 tab = 4 spaces.
2. All code is ASCII.
3. Line length is arbitrary, but preferred to be within 80 characters for header files.
4. Comments should be

   //

   whenever possible to allow block commenting around it.
5. Whitespace should be minimal around keywords (

   if(cond){

   is preferred), and opening curly braces should almost never be on their own line. For loops look like this:

   for(int i = 0; i < 10; ++i){

   .
6. Names should be CaptializedWords or with_underscores, but never javaCamelCase. Hungarian notation is right out.
7. Exceptions are never to be used.
8. No preprocessor shenanigans, unless absolutely necessary.
9. No preprocessor shenanigans.
10. No RTTI.