Fluent C++ Is 3 Years Old

Published November 12, 2019

As Frédéric Beigbeder has it, Love Lasts Three Years. Let’s hope that a blog lasts longer than that because…

Fluent C++ is 3 years old!

fluent C++ 3 years old

Three years. That sounds like a long time, especially if we think about in terms of number of posts. With two posts a week for three years, that makes more than 300 posts, combining mine and our fantastic guest authors’. Indeed, we hit the 300 bar a couple of weeks ago:

We just reached 300 published posts on Fluent C++!https://t.co/pEMjYYJnDh

— Jonathan Boccara (@JoBoccara) October 8, 2019

Let’s take a moment to celebrate!

Let’s also take a step back on the past year and think about what the coming year will look like.

The third year of Fluent C++

What happened this year?

The major event that happened for me is a baby that came on the planet this year. Her name is Anna, and I send her lots of love. There is a bit of time before she can read those lines though (she currently speaks the international baby tongue (“aaaaaahh”), she’s planned to speak French after that, then when she masters English she will know from this post that her dad sends her tons of love).

Back to the blog, we had 104 posts about making code expressive, including 27 guest posts. And a big thanks to the awesome guest authors!

By the way, if you know something about making code expressive, why wouldn’t you write on Fluent C++ too?

Those 104 posts of this past year approached the theme of expressive code under a variety of angles. One theme that we talked a lot about recently is the pipes library. It’s a library based on a simple concepts to manipulate collections in C++: think of your code as plumbing, where data flows through pipes.

Here is an example of an elaborate pipeline:

pipeline

Its corresponding code with the pipes library would look like this:

A >>= pipes::transform(f)
  >>= pipes::filter(p)
  >>= pipes::unzip(pipes::push_back(B),
                   pipes::demux(pipes::push_back(C),
                                pipes::filter(q) >>= pipes::push_back(D),
                                pipes::filter(r) >>= pipes::push_back(E));

The pipes library are a complement to other libraries out there, for example ranges.

Another major event for me this year is that I published my first book, The Legacy Code Programmer’s Toolbox:

It’s a book about being efficient and–just as importantly–happy when working with legacy code.

In this book I share advice about how to stay super motivated even if there is legacy code in your job, how to understand legacy code quickly, and plenty other practical tips that make your life easier when working with legacy code.

The book has over 750 readers on Leanpub now, this is very cool.

I want to thank Kevlin Henney for his help with the book and for writing its foreword.