25th September

In working on my Gopher client for Haiku, not only have I realised how bad my
C++ has gotten over the years (having not really used it much for 20 years at
this point) but also that I also should have planned ahead more. I've been
working on certain types of systems for so long that I don't need to work out
a plan in advance, I tend to know the patterns that'll work, but here, I do
not.

Back in the late 90s and early 2000s I did play with programming a little
under BeOS, but never to a huge extent, and never built anything that 
actually served a useful purpose. The upshot of all this being my current
code is a bit of a mess, but hey it works. I mean there's bugs, and it almost
definitely leaks memory right now, but those things can be fixed. What this
project has reminded me of, is how enjoyable the BeAPI documentation was to
read.

The OS itself had plenty of whimsy, and of course Haiku's name is a remnant
of that, but I'd forgotten the the API documentation is written in a far
less serious tone compared to typical technical documentation, doubly so
when compared to it's contemporaries.

I was reading some of the BeBook last night to get a handle on some of the
details of a Socket, and was greeted by this nugget:

"To receive data, you create a socket, tell it which computer to listen to
(in some cases), and then wait for data to come pouring in."
	 - The BeBook page on Network Sockets

As is often the case with the BeOS, this put a smile on my face and left me
pondering what could have been had certain business deals played out.