The StackOverflow Podcast

Atwood: Hi, Joel.

Spolsky: Hey, Jeff.

Atwood: Hey sorry I was a little slow to answer the phone there.

Spolsky: That's okay, I was a little bit early today.

Atwood: Yeah, I see that.

Spolsky: By one minute.

Spolsky: I was just running out of things to do.

Atwood: Yeah, are you actually at the office now?

Spolsky: I am, yeah.

Atwood: It's pretty dead there, I would hope.

Spolsky: Uh, it's about half. I think we're about half staffed right now.

Atwood: Yeah, well my boss is kind of a jerk. He doesn't always give me time off, and often I have to come into the office at odd hours.

Spolsky: You don't have a boss.

Atwood: I know.  That's the joke.  It's really hilarious.

Spolsky: Ha ha ha.  You were working on servers there, over the, uh, Christian holiday.

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Atwood:

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Spolsky:

1:02:45

Atwood:  Let's go a little bit... Let's go like ten minutes long this time because I do want to do a Stackoverflow question because I have a really good one.  So we'll be a little bit long, but I think it's OK because we didn't have a show last week.  Um.  So the one I want to talk about is "Array's, What's the Point".

Spolsky: Oh, yeah, that was a good... that was surprisingly good.

Atwood: 392397 is the number.  I'll obviously link in the show notes.  The funny thing about his one is that I actually read about it through a third party.  Like I didn't even actually find it on the Stackoverflow site.

Spolsky: 'inaudible ' on Reddit I think.  Or Hackernews.

Atwood: It might have been on Reddit.  I saw it because Damian Katz blogged about it and, uh,  I was just surprised to see him reference a Stackoverflow question.  And and his point was, and I tend to agree, is that, arrays, it's interesting, but arrays really have kind of lost a lot of their significance in , sort of, modern programming languages.  That, uh, you know, a lot of time we use data structures that kind of abstract away the fact that underneath they might be using arrays, or they might not be, it doesn't really matter.  But very little of the time are you going, you know like, a sub one or a sub two.  It's just not a very super-common activity.  And, that was his initial reaction was "how could people not understand arrays, that's incredible, that's ridiculous, we're not teaching our students" and then his second reaction was "wait a minute, there's something to this.  Like, maybe arrays.. We've kind of moved away from arrays as, like, a fundamental data structure because, you know, they're too low level ultimately."  Like pointers.  Like the whole argument would be for pointers.

Spolsky:

Atwood:

Spolsky: