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I'd like to draw (pen and pencils) threads interaction in a UML(-like) notation. I don't insist on UML, anything that is obvious to the reader should do. I started with sequence diagrams, but I don't feel this is the best way to do that. All the time, there would be "action initiators" coming from off-screen which kind...
I'm the lead designer in our team, which means I'm responsible for the quality of the code; functionality, maintainability and readability. How clean should I require my team members' code to be if we are not short on time? In my view, we should clean up old code we modify; adding a line to a method means you clean up ...
I know it may have been asked before, but here goes nothing... Is Perl still something that would be considered useful? If someone was a new programmer (either completely new to programming or just a few month/years of experience) would Perl be something to be considered worthwhile to learn? Is Perl still used with fre...
There are some great libraries for Python that have cousins in the .NET world, but some are unmatched. Realizing that Python is a dynamic language, which makes it difficult to mix with a (largely) statically typed language like C# (though this is seemingly getting easier with .NET 4.0), there are options like IronPyt...
I'm planning to buy a book to learn C Language. Many say K&R is a must-have book for C programmers so I chose it. I see that there are two editions. What are the differences between them?
A professional full-time programmer can do a great job by continuously learning from their work. How can an amateur programmer train to become a good programmer? ** If you like to play music or sing, you can do it because it is your hobby and you are interested, and you can become a good singer or music player. But yo...
I'm talking about unit tests in the TDD sense. (Not automated "integration", or what you like to call it tests.) Legacy code as in: (C++) code without tests. (see: Michael Feathers' Working Effectively with Legacy Code) But also legacy code as in: Code that our team has been working with for the last 10-5 years, so we...
We're in the business of automated trading and our team consists of two bigger groups, I call them data producers and data consumers. The producers' primary task is to maintain a chain of smaller tools that push some real-time data through an indicator system and out comes an order. All the data that was needed or pro...
Possible Duplicate: How do I create my own programming language and a compiler for it Note: This is not a possible duplicate; it is more specified. What is the first step into making your own programming language? Is it something you jump into, or are there steps you must take? Thanks!
I'm creating an object whose sole purpose is to read in a file of one format and create another of a different format. Is it best to create the output file implicitly during object initialization or to have a public method that gives the user the choice when this file will be created?
We have implemented Scrum quite successfully for the past 5 months. Though, we are 3 weeks away from PROD without ever doing any end-to-end integration test. OUCH! I need help. Without tackling the causes of this (at THIS point), we need now to plan the current iteration, which consists of minor improvements and MANY s...
I started using Github now that I'm working on a project with some guys. And I started to wonder if I should use it in my personal projects too. I'm not sure if this will help me in some way or if it is unnecesary?
Possible Duplicate: What should every programmer know about web development? Where do I start if I want to build a web based application? Books, tutorials, online resources. From a quick look at the web I can see that Html, Css and JavaScript should be the subjects to learn. Do you agree? What would you recommend ...
I have recently been reading Hohpe and Woolf's Enterprise Integration Patterns, some of Thomas Erl's books on SOA and watching various videos and podcasts by Udi Dahan et al. on CQRS and Event Driven systems. Systems in my place of work suffer from high coupling. Although each system theoretically has its own database,...
I am reading the following in a book on algorithms (Cormen's to be specific): That is, we are concerned with how the running time of an algorithm increases with the size of the input in the limit, as the size of the input increases without bound. I can not understand what is the meaning of the phrase: with the...
I have entered into an existing project that is all about maintaining nested data structures. You have companies which are assigend to accounts, and contacts and notes and... basically the usual bunch of 1:1, 1..n, n:m Database relations, stored in mysql or postgres, wrapped by Doctrine. Of course, every node comes wit...
I watched a Google Tech Talk presentation on Unit Testing, given by Misko Hevery, and he said to avoid using the new keyword in business logic code. I wrote a program, and I did end up using the new keyword here and there, but they were mostly for instantiating objects that hold data (ie, they didn't have any functions...
After having hard time trying to remember details of my past projects several years ago I was wondering how programmers usually keep track of that? This kind of information comes handy with job interviews etc. Do you write down technologies used, challenges faced etc to some kind of "jumbo CV"? Or do you just trust you...
I've thought for about six months now that I should join an open-source iPhone or iPad project to hone my skills in Objective-C, but every time I go to do it I see thousands of lines of code on huge projects that I end up convincing myself I would never understand. I always think that my commits would just end up being...
Alright I'm new to programming and I admit this is a fairly abstract question. The natural language we speak every day exist because people can understand each other. How can computers understand my code written in a certain language? Let's say Mr. A creates a new language. How is that accepted by machines? Must the cr...
What is the fascination with taking old concepts coming up with a buzzword for them and pitching it as new technology complete with 800 page tome with nerd on the cover? A long long time ago, lets say the 80's, I wrote software. It was designed reasonably well and it worked and was maintainable. It separated out differ...
Assumptions: Minimalist ASP.NET MVC 3 application for sending emails where the view represents the contents of an email. Over 500+ email types. I would NOT like to have 500+ actions in my controller corresponding to each email type. Email types are stored in an enum named MailType, so we could have: MailType.ThankYou...
I just read Balancing Agility and Discipline. Poor title aside, it contrasted a plan-driven project team that was employing PSP/TSP and an agile team using Extreme Programming. When the authors provided an example of a plan-driven methodology, they used Personal Software Process/Team Software Process. Although, out-of-...
The BitBucket capabilities, and pricing (up to 5 users for free) left me wondering what the catch was... there is no such thing as a free lunch, after all. What is BitBucket getting out of my unpaid participation, besides a handsome man to freely include in their promotional materials (per the TOS)?
I don't know much about C# but I've been programming in Java for a few months now. I had always heard what C and C++ were, but was a little curious about where C# came from. I'm a little confused about the C# language since even though it's one of the 'C' languages (C, C++, C#), on the other hand all of my professors s...
We waste a lot of time using tool specific terms when we are all really talking about the same things. The problem is that person1 is familiar with toolset1, person2 with toolset2 etc. So each uses a set of terms that they are the most comfortable with and in the end, we end up talking at cross purposes. Has anyone com...
Aren't you essentially writing the same data twice, to the disk? Doesn't this cause a slowdown of a factor of ~2x? What optimizations can be made to minimize the cost of having to write things twice?
I was talking to a co-worker and was talking of how Database operations usually can be broken down into one of the elements of CRUD- Create, read, update and delete. That's when I realised that I do not know how to pronounce CRUD. So is there a definite, well accepted way to pronounce CRUD?
When I make a web app I test my work on the browser to see if I receive any errors and fix them. I have made complex applications and testing this way has been easy and fast. I have watched many videos on youtube regarding phpunit and cannot find a purpose for it. Why is this library useful? Is phpunit more for php fra...
How do I unit test a web forms site? It seems to me that as so much of it depends on state and user input it wouldn't be feasible. If it's not feasible is there a valid automated alternative?
Please excuse the artwork, I know it looks like an elongated imperial shuttle, but it's the way I visualise a multiple team (or multiple stream) version control strategy. The central core, is the trunk (or master) repository. If there were lots more streams you can imagine more planes projecting out from the trunk, in...
I am looking to incorporate a domain name lookup facility in my website to make sure if a domain is available or not. The only api I could find on the net is http://www.domaintools.com/api/docs/domain-search/ . But this is paid. Is there any other api available which might be cheaper / free. I am working with php, quer...
I am using Hg for my development. Recently, I upgraded to Lion and Xcode 4.2 and I have created a Xcode project in my source tree. The Xcode by default uses Git and created .git folder in the project folder. Being able to do versioning in Xcode is a plus but it is sort of redundant with both Git and Hg. The problem is...
I have a confession to make: Formalized automated testing was never a part of my programming background. I now work in a very large company with many developers (most of them web developers of one sort or another), and it's apparent that most of them don't test* either. (*I'm not going to keep saying formally; please i...
I'm making a java app. Is to solve a problem in engineering. I'm thinking that it would be nice to sell it as an app in the google chrome market, but I'm worried about security. I've been trying to find any info on the subject, but to no avail. Does anybody have any thoughts on this? how secure is the google chrome mar...
I am creating a rails app with following constraints It has no database It uses a web API to store and retrieve the data The connection to the web API is via a custom gem. The Gem has a basic functionality to make a web API call based on the parameters given. I have 2-3 different kinds of object that I can think of (...
I've been reading about the C10K Problem, and of particular note is the part that refers to asynchronous server I/O. http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html#aio I believe this pretty much summarises what Node.js does on the server, by allowing threads to process user requests whilst relying on I/O interrupts (events) to notify ...
How widely used is alloca in the real world? Should I teach my students to use alloca when it makes sense? Or should I teach them never to use it? Coming from a C++ RAII background, the idea of not having to call free manually sounds promising, especially in functions with multiple exit points.
I have developed a few websites and applications using C#, and lately I've been developing a website in ASP.NET MVC. To be honest, this has pissed me off somewhat as it has me feeling like I have zero knowledge. So many things work under the hood in .NET that I'm just not able to focus and understand what is left to th...
In class today we were introduced to the MVVM architecture for Silverlight/WinPhone/WPF; it looks nice for big projects, but what are your thoughts on MVVM? What are the pros and cons? I want to get more into the architecture so that I know when I should use it.
I'm reviewing my peer's code. I use SourceGear DiffMerge as my diff program, on a Windows environment. While I'm using the diff program, I can clearly see the code changes, etc. Is it possible to save the diff display somehow, with all its colorful rendering and strike-throughs so that I can send my comments by mail? I...
My understanding is that C++ is usually offered as the 1st OOP language, and as the 2nd programming language (after C) in my country (Bangladesh). I've taught it several times, and the problem I've run into is that students often tend to think C++ as an extension of C, i.e. C with cin and cout! This has lead me to thin...
We're considering teaching some employees who have either zero or general hobbyist level programming experience to take workload off me. We use Python/Django which has some of the friendliest documentation around and a breeze to learn. I'm currently a one man IT department for my company and I don't have enough hours ...
I confess: I have a problem to "Keep It Simple and Short" most of the time because trying to make it according to the books I have read, design-patterns I have heard etc. gives me such an enthusiasm -an enthusiasm coming from the sense of that I am on the right path to a probable perfection. On the other hand, yes, it ...
This is somewhat similar to this question but more broad. In general, with ORMs like EF 4.1 supporting POCOs, does it now make sense to have your domain entities be the objects that are persisted to your database? With older ORMs like EF 4 or Linq-to-SQL, your "database objects" were auto-generated, and tightly coupled...
Consider conflict markers. i.e.: <<<<<<< branch blah blah this ======= blah blah that >>>>>>> HEAD In the particular case which has motivated me to post this question, the team member responsible had just completed a merge from upstream to our branch, and had in some cases left these in, as comments, as a sort of docu...
need some of you to remember back to a time when you might have been bad at programming... Been at my new job (as a software developer) for a couple of months now, passed probation period. Have very little programming experience (C++ only) and am currently working with asp.net MVC and silverlight. So there's a website ...
I'm just starting out with some articles and tutorials. I am looking for some guidance on which languages to start with and what is the best way to go about learning code, books, tutorials, classes. Which tutorials or books are best? Is it possible to learn this stuff online? If so how? Thanks for any help!
When is it appropriate to use a fall-through (classic) switch statement? Is such usage recommended and encouraged or should it be avoided at all costs?
Possible Duplicate: Do people in non-English-speaking countries code in English? I am from the Netherlands and we speak Dutch. I have worked on quite a few projects now in various languages, and I must say what always annoys me is the mixing of Dutch and English words in the naming of urls, variables, classes, file...
I generally favour using small methods, as recommended by, amongst others, Bob Martin in Clean Code. I've also read enough about Objective-C's internals to have at least some idea about how its message dispatch works (bbums series is particularly informative on this). Premature optimisation concerns notwithstanding, I'...
I found this question on stack overflow and I have a question about one of the answers: In Zend Framework, forms are typically objects with decorators, but usually (I thought) processing is done using a combination of controllers and models, with the main objective to keep the controller as lightweight as possible, an...
I'm writing an online game that has to run in a web browser and I'm worried about whether my server-side architecture will be able to handle the load. I'm designing for 1000-2000 simultaneous clients. Each client will need to query the server once every 2 seconds - so 500-1000 transactions per second is my design goal...
Background So I have developed an order system and order tracking for a organisation. Currently it is web based with plans to develop a mobile application and a desktop application. The business model is an exclusive membership where you sign up to be able to distribute their products at a cheaper price than other comp...
My team and I are developing an enterprise-level application and I have devised an architecture for it that's best described as an "Expression Tree". The basic idea is that the leaf nodes of the tree are very simple expressions (perhaps simple values or strings). Nodes closer to the trunk will get more and more complex...
I'm using the Model View Presenter (MVP) pattern as described in The Humble Dialog Box paper (pdf) with an MFC project. I'm sure the issue is the same with most GUI toolkits. The thing that's bothering me is the concrete view (i.e., the dialog class) is creating not only the presenter but also the services that the pr...
I am trying to solve programming challenges on www.interviewstreet.com using PHP. Are there certain techniques I should keep in mind that will optimize the efficiency of the algorithm? For example, I read that using PHP's language constructs versus function calls are faster. Is this true? Any other tips?
I'm working on a project that involves the chaining of separate jobs into a single master job, though there may be parallel paths in the chain leading up to the final output. Job and chain details will be stored in a database. Eventually what I want to end up with is a GUI in which blocks representing the individual jo...
I want to compare the performance of two search trees of integers (an AVL tree and a RedBlack tree). How should I design/engineer the tests to accomplish this? For example, let's consider the insert operation; what steps should I follow in order to state that on average this operation is faster in the RB case? What con...
Is there any view on whether using the #define to define full lines of code for simplifying coding is good or bad programming practice? For example, if I needed to print a bunch of words together, I'd get annoyed typing << " " << To insert a space between words in a cout statement. I could just do #define pSpace << " ...
I really like pair programming for particular projects or features. It can act as an immediate sanity check and increase code coverage across your development team. That said I always seem to run into an issue regarding editors. I primarily code Ruby and I personally like to use VIM whereas other developers on my team ...
You can have different HTML input elements on a single HTML form and all of them, have their associated remembered values (values that you've entered in those fields); Is it related to the id or name attribute of the input element? No. Proof? Your email address appears on many input elements across different websites, ...
Possible Duplicate: Why do most programming languages not nest block comments? Most languages I've worked with don't have support for recursive/nested comments. Is there any reason why language designers would choose not to implement this? Is it deceptively complex? Would it have undesired results? I know there co...
I'm trying to understand if JavaBeans is a good example of encapsulation. In my view, it's not as usually all the internal state is exposed through getters and setters. A simple example is public class Test { private List<String> names = new ArrayList<String>(); public List<String> getNames() { return ...
I have an HTML form, with more than 30 fields in it. When this form is submitted to the server, all of the values of the fields should be trimmed. In other words, no value should start/end with any kind of whitespace (\b). There are many options available for me: Manually trim each value Looping over values and trim ...
When Java was developed, it's designers chose to discard an unusual amount of the conventional wisdom established in the UNIX and C oriented toolchains. For one (and in my view) the most major example, they chose to discard the practice of header files and Makefiles and tried to build a monolithic, dependency-aware com...
One of my friend was asked this interview question - "There is a constant flow of numbers coming in from some infinite list of numbers out of which you need to maintain a datastructure as to return the top 100 highest numbers at any given point of time. Assume all the numbers are whole numbers only." This is simp...
At the company I'm working we support two versions of the software we develop. One version is available for customers, and one version the developers are developing new functionality in. The version available for customers is also changed by developers, to fix the bugs our customers have found. So, for example we have...
Back in my self-employment days, I've once taken on a small and rather well-paid project: "A newsletter system", the spec stated. Everything was fine, invoices were paid with each milestone reached, me was a happy developer … Until Mr. Client started demanding mail header spoofing and a bunch of other functionality ev...
Counting lines of code and comments is sometimes bogus, since most of what we write may be written in one or more lines, depending column count limitations, screen size, style and so forth. Since the commonly used languages (say C, C++, C# and Java) are free-form, wouldn't it be more clever to count characters instead?...
I have written a warehouse management web app. The application handles batch picking, warehouse routing, packing, and the final piece is handled by UPS worldship to "ship" the packages. Worldship will write a record to my postgres db after every shipment or void. I need a way to cleanly see that the record was written/...
I found myself struggling to see what is this principle about and why is it so important for language design. Basically, it states, that for every expression expr in language should be exactly the same as this construct: (function () { return expr; })() Also, I have heard that Ruby obeys this principle, while Python d...
Will the GC take care of all memory management issues (memory leaks) ? Is there any case where you don't want the GC to take control of some part of your code ?
Are there any domain models already created for education industry? For example we have Prima IBCS for insurance. I was looking for something along similar lines.
I read some books about software architecture as we are using it in our project but I can't classify the architecture properly. It's some kind of Enterprise Architecture, but what exactly... SOA, ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), Message Bus, Event Driven SOA, there are so many terms in Enterprise software.... The system i...
I've read Steve McConnell's "Code Complete" and one of items in checklist for requirements is: "Is the definition of success included? Of failure?". Why is this important? Can you write any examples of those definitions? Can anybody provide examples of good requirements specification?
My teacher just told me that whenever I create a class to run something for a video game company that uses Eclipse, I should make a run class with the main and any outputs. He says any arithmetic should then be put in its own class. Here's the example he gave us. //triangle import java.util.Scanner; import java.lang.M...
There are those tags which have immediate effect (< br >) and those which affect what is between them ( < a > < / a > ). Closing tag is verbose, and I believe also redundant: <tag parameters> ... </tag> verbose Compare to LISP's s-expresions. (tag parameters) redundant Ending tags are not even necessary. These lang...
I read, that Smalltalk was designed for kids or for education. So was it good at it? Better than the other languages? Was it good/easy also for average kid (I read that bright kids enjoyed). Is there any study to back it up? Or is Your experience it is good?
Our code is bad. It might not have always been considered bad, but it is bad and is only going downhill. I started fresh out of college less than a year ago, and many of the things in our code puzzle me beyond belief. At first I figured that as the new guy I should keep my mouth shut until I learned a little more about...
I've been trying to go over my tuple calculus over and over again. What's worse is that my professor and tutors are not much help during their hours. Does anyone know a good place to learn about tuple calculus? I'm having a hard time understanding how to "speak" the language in terms of what I want to get from a datab...
I have thousands of .xml files from size 1MB-45MB (no DTDs). I need to parse and further manipulate these XML files before generating separate .xml files with the results of my regex. What the fastest open-source XML parsing library for C++? Aside from the parsing library, what other approaches can I use to speed up XM...
Consider the following code: DerivedClass drbObj = (DerivedClass)obj; Here obj is of type Object and this is reasonable since Object is the base type of every Class in C#. Here, since the type of derObj is defined at compile time, what is the need to explicitly use type conversion here. Can't the compiler predict on i...
I am trying to do some design in Blend 4. The sample data function of Blend is nice to have during design time, but it could be much more better to see the design in browser. Can anyone help me to use sample data created by Blend as real data (see same data in browser) also ? Thanks in advance.
How much do you, as .Net developers, consider the changes between Windows XP, 7, & 8 when choosing your development environment and libraries? We are nearing the end of Windows XP; Windows 7 is noticeably and aggressively making it's mark; Windows 8 (Win R/T) is on the horizon. Granted, flexibility is completely expec...
There are a number of questions on this site that give plenty of information about the benefits that can be gained from automated testing. But I didn't see anything that represented the other side of the coin: what are the disadvantages? Everything in life is a tradeoff and there are no silver bullets, so surely ther...
Here's an interesting discussion of Tennent's Correspondence Principle, and a brief description from Neal Gafter: The principle dictates that an expression or statement, when wrapped in a closure and then immediately invoked, ought to have the same meaning as it did before being wrapped in a closure. Any change in sem...
Is there a duration limit for FDD Project when those projects are likely to fail due external and internal factors? For example XP projects should kept short due the openess of the concept and dependents on the individuals in the team and lack of documentation which is vulnerable to disturbances like losing team member...
I want to make User Manual/Help to my program. I found two good ways - XML or HTML - which should I use and why? I know how to do it in html (I know how to use js, css and such) but in XML it's harder (or I imagine?) anyway which way should I choose and why?... Edit: There's one important thing I forgot to mention: I n...
I am in the process of implementing a small web application using memcached for caching objects and sql server for database persistence. In all the projects I have done before I have done inserts/updates in the web thread itself. In this project I want to implement asynchronous inserts and updates. I will use memcache...
In the .NET world, I was able to find several industry figures or luminaries' blogs to read or to follow on twitter to learn about features and trends. Moving into the iOS realm, I'm kind of surprised how difficult it has been to find analogous resources. What resources should I be reading/following/osmosing to get be...
Lately I have been struggling to understand what the right amount of checking is and what the proper methods are. I have a few questions regarding this: What is the proper way to check for errors (bad input, bad states, etc)? Is it better to explicitly check for errors, or use functions like asserts which can be optim...
We have an OOP course at our university, while discussing the concepts I came across MetaClass and Delegation. As far as I know, these don't exist in C++. Could someone give an example by which I can better understand how to simulate them instead.
I'd like to know the Agile stance on the following situation: A contractual, payable milestone states a working version must be installed and run at customer's location; Development is still ongoing, not all user stories and issues are addressed; A later deployment will be required My understanding was that the produ...
A Red/Black Tree is one way to implement a balanced binary search tree. The principles behind how it works make sense to me, but the chosen colors don't. Why red and black, as opposed to any other pair of colors or of attributes in general? When I hear "red and black," the first things that come to mind are checkerb...
This is my first question. I love Mathematics; I love the logic and the problem solving. At the same time, I enjoy Computer Science and hope to go into Artificial Intelligence research after I get my Bachelors degree, i.e pursue a PhD in Computer Science. Are there any advantages of having a firm grasp of Mathematics t...
I've been doing TDD with a project I'm working on, and I have quite a large number of tests. I have quite a few automated tests around restrictions enforced in code, making sure things that shouldn't be allowed aren't allowed. Now I've been told that due to changes in our licensing model, some of those restrictions n...
I am currently teaching myself Python, using the GNU licensed book "Introduction to Computer Science using Python." In chapter 3, functions are covered. While I understand the concept of functions and how they simplify code by executing a defined sequence of statements whenever they care called, and that Modules are c...
"A/B testing" is defined as "a method of marketing testing by which a baseline control sample is compared to a variety of single-variable test samples in order to improve response rates". The point here, of course, is to know which small single-variable changes are more optimal, with the goal of finding the local optim...
If I understand correctly, there was a huge birth of programming languages during the early decades of computing, but then things have stabilized. Basically, why are many universities and industries still using languages such as C and C++ (which were created decades ago), when there have been plenty of decades since th...

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