I Think I Dreamt Of Electric Sheep

We are in India, visiting family. While in Hyderabad, we thought it would be a great idea to invite 30 of our extended family on a vacation to Goa!! I mean, the sun and the sand, palm trees and all the fish and shrimp you can eat. What could be more heavenly?

Well, with that many people, flying was out of the question, so, we rented a bus, and took a 16 hour trip to paradise.

Now, if you’ve ever done extensive travel in India, you might be familiar with what a challenging choice this might be. The railroads would be smoother, but might take quite a long time, and flying would only be a 90 minute trip, but again, coordinating that for 30+ people on short notice is kind of hard, and expensive.

So… Just to set the scene

It’s not like there is one contiguous, smooth, multi-lane highway between Hyderabad and Goa. There are a few sections of major highway between this city or that, but for the most part, you’re traveling lesser roads between villages. When you get into villages, there are speed bumps, to prevent… speeding of course. And this makes for very interesting interruptions along the way. At a couple of points, we were on dirt roads, because the main road (next to us) was being repaired, expanded, or otherwise worked on.

The bottom line is, it’s a challenging trip, so what’s a programmer to do?

Way back in the day, I was so deep into programming that I would visualize programming challenges before I went to sleep, and then solve them while I slept. That was a great technique, and I actually trained myself for self hypnosis, and vivid dreaming. I had long since given up the practice though, as other things in life took priority. On this long interrupt filled ride though, I found myself tapping back into that old technique.

At the moment, I find myself refreshing an old library that I started to put together some time last year. The procure (https://github.com/Wiladams/procore) repository takes some bits and pieces from various projects I’ve done over the past couple of years, and cleans them up for general usability. So, what to think about when on that bumpy bus ride? I was thinking about how to best code up a data structure that can be used by both C and C++ programmers. My graphics library of choice, blend2d, does this fairly well. The C programmer (and thus, just about any scripting environment) can interact with blend2d with no problems. At the same time, the C++ programmer will feel right at home, with all the syntactic sugar to give them a toothache if they so desire. So, I took this as inspiration for my own creations.