Software Engineering discussion

Again, not my domain and more architecture than code. Interestingly, the chapter highlights the beauty of making C look more OO-like. Why not just use an OO language? Probably, too much legacy C code in this app. I do see a more general trend toward longer variable names. As someone who grew up with name length constraints (and even case contraints!), this has taken a while for me to adopt, and autocomplete tooling helps. I do agree about the importance of consistent case conventions.

I am glad to see the attention to minimizing disk seeks, since these bottlenecks are not only time consuming today, but the gap between disk performance and CPU speed continues to widen over time. This is a tough thing to teach, because today's programming abstractions are often very far removed from the disk activity consequences.

The chapter names seem to be frequently misleading me. I was expecting a chapter about Gene sorting, or a continuation from Chapter 12. Chapter 12 did have some introduction that was nice to have read before reading this chapter.

What I understood was very generic to filtering and table usage. There was probably specific details that I missed or didn't understand.

I've used C function pointers and union structures several times. Sadly, I didn't make the leap to thinking about them as OO concepts until now.