A while back, thedailywtf.com ran this entry onC preprocessor abuse. Unfortunately (and in fact as noted in thecomments), this is nothing to the true devotee of turning C into adifferent language.

This preprocessor trail was blazed early on, in the V7 Bourne shell,written by Steve Bourne. The story goes that Bourne didn't really likeC all that much, and instead much preferred Algol. Armed with the newC preprocessor he saw the opportunity to fix this problem and createdwhat

I'm bad with anniversaries and at making blog entries come out on time,so it was a year and nine days ago that I wrote the very firstWanderingThoughts entry , not a pleasingly exactyear. There's probably a lesson in this.

(Or a year and eight days, depending on how I count it; while I wrotethe first two entries on June 11th, I only made the decision to keepwriting at the pace of an entry a day on the 12th, when

I discovered today that the unpatched Solaris ssh program doesn'tunderstand the 'GSSAPIKeyExchange' and 'GSSAPIAuthentication'configuration options that are necessary to fix the problem on the patched ssh. (I had them in a $HOME/.ssh/config file that was shared between a patched system and anunpatched system.)

So what appears to have happened is that Sun developed a new version ofssh that implements the GSS stuff, and as a result requires it and theKerberos stuff to be installed and configured and so

Improving programming productivity is a big business, producing a neverending parade of methodologies and processes and research and whatnots.But over the past 40 odd years I think we've learned that there'sonly four real ways to do it:

1. reduce connections
2. write less code
3. meetings kill kittens
4. get better people

(to put them all in punchy short forms)

None of these should be new to people, since Fred Brooks covered themall 30 years ago in The Mythical Man-Month (with much better writing,