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  • What source code organization approach helps improve modularity and API/Implementation separation?

    - by Berin Loritsch
    Few languages are as restrictive as Java with file naming standards and project structure. In that language, the file name must match the public class declared in the file, and the file must live in a directory structure matching the class package. I have mixed feelings about that approach. While I never have to guess where a file lives, there's still a lot of empty directories and artificial constraints. There's several languages that define everything about a class in one file, at least by convention. C#, Python (I think), Ruby, Erlang, etc. The commonality in most these languages is that they are object oriented, although that statement can probably be rebuffed (there is one non-OO language in the list already). Finally, there's quite a few languages mostly in the C family that have a separate header and implementation file. For C I think this makes sense, because it is one of the few ways to separate the API interface from implementations. With C it seems that feature is used to promote modularity. Yet, with C++ the way header and implementation files are split seems rather forced. You don't get the same clean API separation that you do with C, and you are forced to include some private details in the header you would rather keep only in the implementation. There's quite a few languages that have a concept that overlaps with interfaces like Java, C#, Go, etc. Some languages use what feels like a hack to provide the same concept like C# using pure virtual abstract classes. Still others don't really have an interface concept and rely on "duck" typing--for example Ruby. Ruby has modules, but those are more along the lines of mixing in behaviors to a class than they are for defining how to interact with a class. In OO terms, interfaces are a powerful way to provide separation between an API client and an API implementation. So to hurry up and ask the question, from a personal experience point of view: Does separation of header and implementation help you write more modular code, or does it get in the way? (it helps to specify the language you are referring to) Does the strict file name to class name scheme of Java help maintainability, or is it unnecessary structure for structure's sake? What would you propose to promote good API/Implementation separation and project maintenance, how would you prefer to do it?

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  • Balancing game difficulty against player progression

    - by Raven Dreamer
    It seems that the current climate of games seems to cater to an obvious progression of player power, whether that means getting a bigger, more explosive gun in Halo, leveling up in an RPG, or unlocking new options in Command and Conquer 4. Yet this concept is not exclusive to video or computer games -- even in Dungeons and Dragons players can strive to acquire a +2 sword to replace the +1 weapon they've been using. Yet as a systems designer, the concept of player progression is giving me headache after headache. Should I balance around the players exact capabilities and give up on a simple linear progression? (I think ESIV:Oblivion is a good example of this) Is it better to throw the players into an "arms race" with their opponents, where if the players don't progress in an orderly manner, it is only a matter of time until gameplay is unbearably difficult? (4th Edition DnD strikes me as a good example of this) Perhaps it would make most sense to untether the core gameplay mechanics from progression at all -- give them flashier, more interesting (but not more powerful!) ways to grow?

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  • Does a prose to code compiler exist?

    - by Raynos
    I have seen some horrible code in my time including people virtually duplicating the code in comments // add 4 to x x+=4; // for each i in 0 to 9 for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) { // multiply x by i x *= i; } Taking this concept further, I'm curious whether prose to code compilers exist. Is there a valid use case for English prose to code? Do compilers exist that do this? The distinction between this and auto generated code, is that auto generated code is generally always a subset of a project. Can we have complete projects auto generated from english prose? I realise that this might overlap with the concept of declarative languages.

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  • Source-control 'wet-work'?

    - by Phil Factor
    When a design or creative work is flawed beyond remedy, it is often best to destroy it and start again. The other day, I lost the code to a long and intricate SQL batch I was working on. I’d thought it was impossible, but it happened. With all the technology around that is designed to prevent this occurring, this sort of accident has become a rare event.  If it weren’t for a deranged laptop, and my distraction, the code wouldn’t have been lost this time.  As always, I sighed, had a soothing cup of tea, and typed it all in again.  The new code I hastily tapped in  was much better: I’d held in my head the essence of how the code should work rather than the details: I now knew for certain  the start point, the end, and how it should be achieved. Instantly the detritus of half-baked thoughts fell away and I was able to write logical code that performed better.  Because I could work so quickly, I was able to hold the details of all the columns and variables in my head, and the dynamics of the flow of data. It was, in fact, easier and quicker to start from scratch rather than tidy up and refactor the existing code with its inevitable fumbling and half-baked ideas. What a shame that technology is now so good that developers rarely experience the cleansing shock of losing one’s code and having to rewrite it from scratch.  If you’ve never accidentally lost  your code, then it is worth doing it deliberately once for the experience. Creative people have, until Technology mistakenly prevented it, torn up their drafts or sketches, threw them in the bin, and started again from scratch.  Leonardo’s obsessive reworking of the Mona Lisa was renowned because it was so unusual:  Most artists have been utterly ruthless in destroying work that didn’t quite make it. Authors are particularly keen on writing afresh, and the results are generally positive. Lawrence of Arabia actually lost the entire 250,000 word manuscript of ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by accidentally leaving it on a train at Reading station, before rewriting a much better version.  Now, any writer or artist is seduced by technology into altering or refining their work rather than casting it dramatically in the bin or setting a light to it on a bonfire, and rewriting it from the blank page.  It is easy to pick away at a flawed work, but the real creative process is far more brutal. Once, many years ago whilst running a software house that supplied commercial software to local businesses, I’d been supervising an accounting system for a farming cooperative. No packaged system met their needs, and it was all hand-cut code.  For us, it represented a breakthrough as it was for a government organisation, and success would guarantee more contracts. As you’ve probably guessed, the code got mangled in a disk crash just a week before the deadline for delivery, and the many backups all proved to be entirely corrupted by a faulty tape drive.  There were some fragments left on individual machines, but they were all of different versions.  The developers were in despair.  Strangely, I managed to re-write the bulk of a three-month project in a manic and caffeine-soaked weekend.  Sure, that elegant universally-applicable input-form routine was‘nt quite so elegant, but it didn’t really need to be as we knew what forms it needed to support.  Yes, the code lacked architectural elegance and reusability. By dawn on Monday, the application passed its integration tests. The developers rose to the occasion after I’d collapsed, and tidied up what I’d done, though they were reproachful that some of the style and elegance had gone out of the application. By the delivery date, we were able to install it. It was a smaller, faster application than the beta they’d seen and the user-interface had a new, rather Spartan, appearance that we swore was done to conform to the latest in user-interface guidelines. (we switched to Helvetica font to look more ‘Bauhaus’ ). The client was so delighted that he forgave the new bugs that had crept in. I still have the disk that crashed, up in the attic. In IT, we have had mixed experiences from complete re-writes. Lotus 123 never really recovered from a complete rewrite from assembler into C, Borland made the mistake with Arago and Quattro Pro  and Netscape’s complete rewrite of their Navigator 4 browser was a white-knuckle ride. In all cases, the decision to rewrite was a result of extreme circumstances where no other course of action seemed possible.   The rewrite didn’t come out of the blue. I prefer to remember the rewrite of Minix by young Linus Torvalds, or the rewrite of Bitkeeper by a slightly older Linus.  The rewrite of CP/M didn’t do too badly either, did it? Come to think of it, the guy who decided to rewrite the windowing system of the Xerox Star never regretted the decision. I’ll agree that one should often resist calls for a rewrite. One of the worst habits of the more inexperienced programmer is to denigrate whatever code he or she inherits, and then call loudly for a complete rewrite. They are buoyed up by the mistaken belief that they can do better. This, however, is a different psychological phenomenon, more related to the idea of some motorcyclists that they are operating on infinite lives, or the occasional squaddies that if they charge the machine-guns determinedly enough all will be well. Grim experience brings out the humility in any experienced programmer.  I’m referring to quite different circumstances here. Where a team knows the requirements perfectly, are of one mind on methodology and coding standards, and they already have a solution, then what is wrong with considering  a complete rewrite? Rewrites are so painful in the early stages, until that point where one realises the payoff, that even I quail at the thought. One needs a natural disaster to push one over the edge. The trouble is that source-control systems, and disaster recovery systems, are just too good nowadays.   If I were to lose this draft of this very blog post, I know I’d rewrite it much better. However, if you read this, you’ll know I didn’t have the nerve to delete it and start again.  There was a time that one prayed that unreliable hardware would deliver you from an unmaintainable mess of a codebase, but now technology has made us almost entirely immune to such a merciful act of God. An old friend of mine with long experience in the software industry has long had the idea of the ‘source-control wet-work’,  where one hires a malicious hacker in some wild eastern country to hack into one’s own  source control system to destroy all trace of the source to an application. Alas, backup systems are just too good to make this any more than a pipedream. Somehow, it would be difficult to promote the idea. As an alternative, could one construct a source control system that, on doing all the code-quality metrics, would systematically destroy all trace of source code that failed the quality test? Alas, I can’t see many managers buying into the idea. In reading the full story of the near-loss of Toy Story 2, it set me thinking. It turned out that the lucky restoration of the code wasn’t the happy ending one first imagined it to be, because they eventually came to the conclusion that the plot was fundamentally flawed and it all had to be rewritten anyway.  Was this an early  case of the ‘source-control wet-job’?’ It is very hard nowadays to do a rapid U-turn in a development project because we are far too prone to cling to our existing source-code.

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  • What can programmers learn from the construction industry?

    - by Renesis
    When talking with colleagues about software design and development principles, I've noticed one of the most common sources for analogies is the construction industry. We build software and we consider the design and structure to be the architecture. One of the best ways to learn (or teach) are through analyzing analogies - what other analogies can be drawn from construction? (whether already in common use in software or not). Please provide a description, or your personal experience, regarding how the programming concept is similar to the construction concept. [Credit to Programming concepts taken from the arts and humanities for the idea]

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  • Getting My Head Around Immutability

    - by Michael Mangold
    I'm new to object-oriented programming, and one concept that has been taking me a while to grasp is immutability. I think the light bulb went off last night but I want to verify: When I come across statements that an immutable object cannot be changed, I'm puzzled because I can, for instance, do the following: NSString *myName = @"Bob"; myName = @"Mike"; There, I just changed myName, of immutable type NSString. My problem is that the word, "object" can refer to the physical object in memory, or the abstraction, "myName." The former definition applies to the concept of immutability. As for the variable, a more clear (to me) definition of immutability is that the value of an immutable object can only be changed by also changing its location in memory, i.e. its reference (also known as its pointer). Is this correct, or am I still lost in the woods?

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  • What are the most common stumbling blocks when it comes to learning programming, in order of difficulty?

    - by blueberryfields
    I seem to remember that linked lists, recursion, pointers, and memory management are all good examples of stumbling blocks - places where the aspiring programmer typically ends up spending significant time trying to understand a concept before moving on and improving, and many end up giving up and not improving. I'm looking for a complete/comprehensive list of these types of stumbling blocks, in rough estimated order of difficulty to learn, with the goal of making sure that an educational program for programmers is structured to properly guide students through them Is this information available somewhere? Ideally, the difficulty to learn will be measured in some sort of objective manner (ie, % of students which consistently fail to learn the concept) What sources are most appropriate for obtaining this information?

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  • Collaboration platforms

    - by Thomas
    Are there any good collaboration platforms for game development? This would include the following features: Easy way to find various people you need to build games (programmer, artist etc) and forming a team like for example codeplex Online portfolio for users where they can offer their services (either paid or free) Posibility to create a game specific blog or site with social media integration to show the world what's being created Easy way to manage game content / resources with sufficient online storage, version control and if possible source control Manage all phases of game development (startup, creating concept, finding a team, creating proof of concept, production phase etc) and publish specific information for each phase also on social media etc. Manage asset creation flow (request for specific content like a sound, production of sound, uploading the sound, notification to the requester, implementation of the file, retouching in several cycles etc)

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  • What is the term that means "keeping the arguments for different API calls as similar as possible"?

    - by larson4
    There is a word which I can never remember... it expresses a design goal that API calls (or functions or methods or whatever) should be as similar as reasonably possible in their argument patterns. It may also extend to naming as well. In other words, all other things being equal, it is probably bad to have these three functions: deleteUser(email) petRemove(petId,species) destroyPlanet(planetName,starName) if instead you could have deleteUser(userId) deletePet(petId) deletePlanet(planetId) What is the word for this concept? I keep thinking it's "orthogonal" but it definitely isn't. Its a very important concept, and to me it's one of the biggest things that makes some APIs a joy to work with (because once you learn a few things you can pretty much use everything without looking at doco), and others a pain (because every function is done inconsistently).

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  • Manual memory allocation and purity

    - by Eonil
    Language like Haskell have concept of purity. In pure function, I can't mutate any state globally. Anyway Haskell fully abstracts memory management, so memory allocation is not a problem here. But if languages can handle memory directly like C++, it's very ambiguous to me. In these languages, memory allocation makes visible mutation. But if I treat making new object as impure action, actually, almost nothing can be pure. So purity concept becomes almost useless. How should I handle purity in languages have memory as visible global object?

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  • SMTP POP3 & PST. Acronyms from Hades.

    - by mikef
    A busy SysAdmin will occasionally have reason to curse SMTP. It is, certainly, one of the strangest events in the history of IT that such a deeply flawed system, designed originally purely for campus use, should have reached its current dominant position. The explanation was that it was the first open-standard email system, so SMTP/POP3 became the internet standard. We are, in consequence, dogged with a system with security weaknesses so extreme that messages are sent in plain text and you have no real assurance as to who the message came from anyway (SMTP-AUTH hasn't really caught on). Even without the security issues, the use of SMTP in an office environment provides a management nightmare to all commercial users responsible for complying with all regulations that control the conduct of business: such as tracking, retaining, and recording company documents. SMTP mail developed from various Unix-based systems designed for campus use that took the mail analogy so literally that mail messages were actually delivered to the users, using a 'store and forward' mechanism. This meant that, from the start, the end user had to store, manage and delete messages. This is a problem that has passed through all the releases of MS Outlook: It has to be able to manage mail locally in the dreaded PST file. As a stand-alone system, Outlook is flawed by its neglect of any means of automatic backup. Previous Outlook PST files actually blew up without warning when they reached the 2 Gig limit and became corrupted and inaccessible, leading to a thriving industry of 3rd party tools to clear up the mess. Microsoft Exchange is, of course, a server-based system. Emails are less likely to be lost in such a system if it is properly run. However, there is nothing to stop users from using local PSTs as well. There is the additional temptation to load emails into mobile devices, or USB keys for off-line working. The result is that the System Administrator is faced by a complex hybrid system where backups have to be taken from Servers, and PCs scattered around the network, where duplication of emails causes storage issues, and document retention policies become impossible to manage. If one adds to that the complexity of mobile phone email readers and mail synchronization, the problem is daunting. It is hardly surprising that the mood darkens when SysAdmins meet and discuss PST Hell. If you were promoted to the task of tormenting the souls of the damned in Hades, what aspects of the management of Outlook would you find most useful for your task? I'd love to hear from you. Cheers, Michael

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  • It is worth planning before jumping in the code?

    - by Rushino
    I always thought that planning is important for a game. But i don't know at which point. Some are telling me to code instead of planning but i feel like its still important because when you will be in the code you will know what to do next more easily. I am currently working on a game that will have lots of content so i decided to start a design document introducing thoses content and at a side-level i am doing proofs of concept to check if it can be done. Parts of each proofs of concept then could be used later in the real game. EDIT: I am working alone on this project. So my question is : It is worth planning before jumping in the code ? Im still interested to know what others have to say about this. Cause i still get some poeple saying i should code instead of thinking.. so what your opinion on this ?

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  • Should we design programs to randomly kill themselves?

    - by jimbojw
    In a nutshell, should we design death into our programs, processes, and threads at a low level, for the good of the overall system? Failures happen. Processes die. We plan for disaster and occasionally recover from it. But we rarely design and implement unpredictable program death. We hope that our services' uptimes are as long as we care to keep them running. A macro-example of this concept is Netflix's Chaos Monkey, which randomly terminates AWS instances in some scenarios. They claim that this has helped them discover problems and build more redundant systems. What I'm talking about is lower level. The idea is for traditionally long-running processes to randomly exit. This should force redundancy into the design and ultimately produce more resilient systems. Does this concept already have a name? Is it already being used in the industry?

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  • When to Use workflow engines?

    - by A01_
    I'm totally new to this concept from design perspective. I've worked in past on some of the workflow engines as programmer but never had a clarity on why we chose the work-flow engines in first place. And as programmer I know that there are at least 100 ways to do anything when you are writing code but only few of the ways are the best! I still don't understand which use cases are best solved by workflow engines (or rather their concept) than designing a good DI enabled application. I'm looking for any general characteristics of domain-neutral use cases, where work-flow engines are one of the the best options. So my question is: What are general characteristics of a requirement which can be taken as a signal for opting for a good workflow engine and coding around it? Cheers!

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  • Is ROA a specific form of SOA?

    - by JohnDoDo
    I have read somewhere that ROA (Resource Oriented Architecture) is SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) with specific constraints added. SOA is the abstract term and that ROA is an implementation of SOA with all of the constraints of RESTful services (SOA = concept, ROA = concept + implementation details). I also had my share of posts saying that ROA is REST and that SOA is SOAP and going into the same more or less pertinent comparisons between the two (SOAP and REST that is) etc etc. So just to clear up my confusion: Is ROA a specific form of doing SOA?

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  • Why we need apache Tomcat server to deploy any application. or what are the requirements to deploy any code or release?

    - by Shank_SCM
    I am asking very basic concept as I am new to build and release team. I am working with ant scripts to build and deploy the java code + working with TFS to deploy .net code. So my question is: What is apache tomcat and why we need it? Can't we deploy any piece of code or any application without apache tomcat? For windows, what framework we need to deploy(or same tomcat can be used for same)? Please make me understand the basic concept so that I can understand the deploy process or per-requisites of deploying process. what I know (to deploy) Just copy the tar file or zip file to any concerned dev environment and restart the server. Thats it. Please correct me if I am wrong.

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