I was going to write an article on how C++ exceptions are evil – I mean, seriously, you’re crazy to use them, evil. But I got too lazy and instead will inform you about Girl Talk. This is what happens when an engineer from Case gets way too good at NI Reaktor and listens to too much MTV. His sense of timing and blend is absolutely perfect, especially the drum tracks that transition amazingly from song to song, you don’t even realize the changes.

It’s like 10 years of pop music blew up and someone collected the pieces into an album

For those of you who aren’t familiar, basically he makes dance/club music by taking other songs and blending them together in strange and interesting ways. Especially crappy rap songs and alternative kitsch songs – the moment when Biggie Smalls comes over in his intro lines “It was all a dream” with Elton John’s Tiny Dancer is fucking brilliant.

And as to the C++ exceptions, here’s the point: the concept of exceptions needs garbage collection to work in a sane fashion and pick up all the pieces after your function blows up, otherwise writing code that doesn’t leak memory or do crazy things is really, really hard. And when I say “hard”, I mean, the amount of time you will spend debugging is O(n^2), where n is defined as the size of the program. Add the “Exception is like a goto without a definite target”, the lack of a sane call stack depending on your compiler and arch, and you’ve got the recipe for disaster.