Yeah, my development practice also principally centers around having clang repeatedly compile /dev/urandom until it produces a program that does what I wanted.
My colleagues sometimes complain that it takes somewhat longer to do it this way than the old-fashioned “writing the code yourself” way, but on the plus side I don’t have to actually be present at all while it’s doing it. Just have it send you an email once the unit tests all pass and you’re good! This development approach has given me a bunch more time to train my monkeys to type Shakespeare. They’re getting pretty good at MacBeth, and I’m hoping to move on to Othello next week.
A friend of mine questioned why I involve ‘clang’ in the process at all; why not just echo /dev/urandom into a file, set it as executable, and then run it, instead of mucking around with the whole “compiling it with clang” step, but I pointed out, you know, at that point is it even really programming any more?
My colleagues sometimes complain that it takes somewhat longer to do it this way than the old-fashioned “writing the code yourself” way, but on the plus side I don’t have to actually be present at all while it’s doing it. Just have it send you an email once the unit tests all pass and you’re good! This development approach has given me a bunch more time to train my monkeys to type Shakespeare. They’re getting pretty good at MacBeth, and I’m hoping to move on to Othello next week.
A friend of mine questioned why I involve ‘clang’ in the process at all; why not just echo /dev/urandom into a file, set it as executable, and then run it, instead of mucking around with the whole “compiling it with clang” step, but I pointed out, you know, at that point is it even really programming any more?