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• Is there an excuse for short variable names?

  - by KChaloux

  This has become a large frustration with the codebase I'm currently working in; many of our variable names are short and undescriptive. I'm the only developer left on the project, and there isn't documentation as to what most of them do, so I have to spend extra time tracking down what they represent. For example, I was reading over some code that updates the definition of an optical surface. The variables set at the start were as follows: double dR, dCV, dK, dDin, dDout, dRin, dRout dR = Convert.ToDouble(_tblAsphere.Rows[0].ItemArray.GetValue(1)); dCV = convert.ToDouble(_tblAsphere.Rows[1].ItemArray.GetValue(1)); ... and so on Maybe it's just me, but it told me essentially nothing about what they represented, which made understanding the code further down difficult. All I knew was that it was a variable parsed out specific row from a specific table, somewhere. After some searching, I found out what they meant: dR = radius dCV = curvature dK = conic constant dDin = inner aperture dDout = outer aperture dRin = inner radius dRout = outer radius I renamed them to essentially what I have up there. It lengthens some lines, but I feel like that's a fair trade off. This kind of naming scheme is used throughout a lot of the code however. I'm not sure if it's an artifact from developers who learned by working with older systems, or if there's a deeper reason behind it. Is there a good reason to name variables this way, or am I justified in updating them to more descriptive names as I come across them?

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• How to create a reasonably sized urban area manually but efficiently

  - by Overv

  I have a game concept that only really works in an urban area that is of reasonable scale and diversity. In terms of what it should look like, think GTA, in terms of the size think more like a small neighbourhood with residents and a few local shops, perhaps a supermarket. I'm mostly experienced in programming and not at all with modelling, texturing or drawing, but I've found that SketchUp allows me to design interesting looking buildings that I model after real world buildings in my own neighbourhood. Designing these buildings and other objects can take from a few tens of minutes to a few hours. My question is: what is the best approach for a one man army like me who does manage to model buildings to create an interesting city environment in a reasonable amount of time? My game will not be based on procedural generation, the environment will actually be modelled like GTA cities.

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• Skills for RAD developer.

  - by Janis Peisenieks

  I am about to embark on an exquisite journey. I have applied for an event, where in span of 48 straight hours, strangers meet, throw around some great ideas, decide on teams, and make a working prototype of IT project. All within 48 hours. I anticipate, that this will be very skill and ability intensive experience, and I want to be prepared. Since i will need to develop my part of the code quickly, I have a following question: What would be the most needed skills for these 48 hours? I do know, that things like proper documentation, version control and such are pretty important for a full fledged application/program/web development, but for this span of frantic coding? Background: I am a web developer, so answers applicable to web development would be more appreciated than others.

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• What are cons of usage only non-member functions and POD?

  - by Miro

  I'm creating my own game engine. I've read these articles and this question about DOD and there was written to not use member functions and classes. I also heard some criticism to this idea. I can write it using member functions or non-member functions it would be similar. So what are benefits/cons of that approach or when project grows, does any of these approaches give clearer and better manageable code? With POD & non-member functions I don't have to make struct members public I can still use object id outside of engine like OpenGL does with all it's stuff, so It's not about encapsulation. POD - plain old data DOD - data oriented design

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• Designing a Business Rule Engine

  - by Nisha_Roy

  I have a requirement where there are 10 Rules to be applied on data in excel. If Rule 1 and Rule 2 fails rest of the rules are not checked. But if Rule 1 and Rule 2 passes the rest of all the Rules should be verified and if any errors found- they should be logged. Is there any design pattern which I can use to keep this Rule Engine flexible for adding these 10 rules and Closed for any additional chains in the Current Rule. I was thinking of something like a Decorator Pattern. Will this help me achieve that?

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• Designing a game - Where to start?

  - by OghmaOsiris

  A friend of mine and I are planning a game together to work on in our free time. It's not an extensive game, but it's not a simple one either. He's working on the story behind the game while I'm working on the graphics and code. I don't really know where to start with the game. We know what the basic type of game it's going to be and how it would be played, but I'm having a hard time of actually knowing where to begin. I have Xcode open but I don't really even know what I should be designing first. What is some advice for this writer's block? Where is a good place to start with a game? Should I design all the graphics and layout before even touching Xcode? Should I program the things I know I'll have difficulty with first before getting to the easy stuff?

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• Which purpose do armor points serve?

  - by Bane

  I have seen a mechanic which I call "armor points" in many games: Quake, Counter Strike, etc. Generally, while the player has these armor points, he takes less damage. However, they act in a similar fashion that health points do: you lose them by taking said damage. Why would you design such a feature? Is this just health 2.0, or am I missing something? To me, armor only makes sense in, for example, RPG games, where it is a constant that determines your resistance. But I don't see why would it need to be reduceable during combat.

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• Is nesting types considered bad practice?

  - by Rob Z

  As noted by the title, is nesting types (e.g. enumerated types or structures in a class) considered bad practice or not? When you run Code Analysis in Visual Studio it returns the following message which implies it is: Warning 34 CA1034 : Microsoft.Design : Do not nest type 'ClassName.StructueName'. Alternatively, change its accessibility so that it is not externally visible. However, when I follow the recommendation of the Code Analysis I find that there tend to be a lot of structures and enumerated types floating around in the application that might only apply to a single class or would only be used with that class. As such, would it be appropriate to nest the type sin that case, or is there a better way of doing it?

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• Pay for Graphic Designer vs Programmer

  - by FrankSinatra

  In a corporate web-design setup, who typically makes more per hour, the graphic designer or the programmer? By graphic designer, I mean somebody who builds mockups probably in photoshop, selects font-styles, colors, etc. Most things layout-wise are near pixel-perfect, but likely after the initial implementation by the programmer, there will be a lot of small changes directed by the graphic designer. By programmer, I mean somebody who is coding the CSS, the HTML, and light backend support, probably in PHP. The programmer will attempt to duplicate the mockups given the limitations of the medium, and consult with the graphic designer afterwards on what changes are tangible and which are not. Both probably have an undergraduate degree from a respected four-year institution.

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• Is the "One Description Table to rule them all" approch good?

  - by DavRob60

  Long ago, I worked (as a client) with a software which use a centralized table for it's codified element. Here, as far as I remember, how the table look like : Table_Name (PK) Field_Name (PK) Code (PK) Sort_Order Description So, instead of creating a table every time they need a codified field, they where just adding row in this table with the new Table_Name and Field_Name. I'm sometime tempted to use this pattern in some database I design, but I have resisted to this as from now, I think there's something wrong with this, but I cannot put the finger on it. It is just because you land with some of the structure logic within the Data or something else?

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• Is code like this a "train wreck" (in violation of Law of Demeter)?

  - by Michael Kjörling

  Browsing through some code I've written, I came across the following construct which got me thinking. At a first glance, it seems clean enough. Yes, in the actual code the getLocation() method has a slightly more specific name which better describes exactly which location it gets. service.setLocation(this.configuration.getLocation().toString()); In this case, service is an instance variable of a known type, declared within the method. this.configuration comes from being passed in to the class constructor, and is an instance of a class implementing a specific interface (which mandates a public getLocation() method). Hence, the return type of the expression this.configuration.getLocation() is known; specifically in this case, it is a java.net.URL, whereas service.setLocation() wants a String. Since the two types String and URL are not directly compatible, some sort of conversion is required to fit the square peg in the round hole. However, according to the Law of Demeter as cited in Clean Code, a method f in class C should only call methods on C, objects created by or passed as arguments to f, and objects held in instance variables of C. Anything beyond that (the final toString() in my particular case above, unless you consider a temporary object created as a result of the method invocation itself, in which case the whole Law seems to be moot) is disallowed. Is there a valid reasoning why a call like the above, given the constraints listed, should be discouraged or even disallowed? Or am I just being overly nitpicky? If I were to implement a method URLToString() which simply calls toString() on a URL object (such as that returned by getLocation()) passed to it as a parameter, and returns the result, I could wrap the getLocation() call in it to achieve exactly the same result; effectively, I would just move the conversion one step outward. Would that somehow make it acceptable? (It seems to me, intuitively, that it should not make any difference either way, since all that does is move things around a little. However, going by the letter of the Law of Demeter as cited, it would be acceptable, since I would then be operating directly on a parameter to a function.) Would it make any difference if this was about something slightly more exotic than calling toString() on a standard type? When answering, do keep in mind that altering the behavior or API of the type that the service variable is of is not practical. Also, for the sake of argument, let's say that altering the return type of getLocation() is also impractical.

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• Is there a phrase or word to describe an algorithim or programme is complete in that given any value for its arguments there is a predictable outcome?

  - by Mrk Mnl

  Is there a phrase to describe an algorithim or programme is complete in that given any possible value for its arguments there is a predicatable outcome? i.e. all the ramifications have been considered whatever the context? A simple example would be the below function: function returns string get_item_type(int type_no) { if(type_no < 10) return "hockey stick" else if (type_no < 20) return "bulldozer" else return "unknown" } (excuse the dismal pseudo code) No matter what number is supplied all possibiblites are catered for. My question is: is there a word to fill the blank here: "get_item_type() is ______ complete" ? (The answer is not Turing Complete - that is something quite different - but I annoyingly always think of something as "Turing Complete" when I am thinking of the above).

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• How can I exclude content in my notifications bar from being indexed?

  - by Liam E-p

  Of course I want my content to be indexed pretty fast by search engines, however not my notifications bar. My notifications bar contains the last 30 changes to content on the site, and I don't want this to show in my SEO meta. As all the notifications are generic, it often doesn't provide any relevant information. As I said the notifications are generic. If an article named "123" was created, it would create a notification that says "Article "123" was created by xxx at 12:00AM". I'm now wondering if this is a content design problem. As only 1/3 of this information is actually relevant to users (the title, what happened). By SEO meta, and irrelevant notification data being shown, I mean this - Basically what I was wondering, is how I could optimise this, so search engines wouldn't show this generic nonsense.

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• How essential is it to make a service layer?

  - by BornToCode

  I started building an app in 3 layers (DAL, BL, UI) [it mainly handles CRM, some sales reports and inventory]. A colleague told me that I must move to service layer pattern, that developers came to service pattern from their experience and it is the better approach to design most applications. He said it would be much easier to maintain the application in the future that way. Personally, I get the feeling that it's just making things more complex and I couldn't see much of a benefit from it that would justify that. This app does have an additional small partial ui that uses some (but only few) of the desktop application functions so I did find myself duplicating some code (but not much). Just because of some code duplication I wouldn't convert it to be service oriented, but he said I should use it anyway because in general it's a very good architecture, why programmers are so in love with services?? I tried to google on it but I'm still confused and can't decide what to do.

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• Programming habits, patterns, and standards that have developed out of appeal to tradition/by mistake? [closed]

  - by user828584

  Being self-taught, the vast majority of what I know about programming has come from reading other peoples' code on websites like this. I'm starting to wonder if I've developed bad or otherwise pointless habits from other people, or even just made invalid assumptions. For example, in javascript, void 0 is used in a lot of places, and until I saw this, I just assumed it was necessary and that 0 had some significance. Also, the http header, referer is misspelled but hasn't been changed because it would break a lot of applications. Also mentioned in Code Complete 2: The architecture should describe the motivations for all major decisions. Be wary of “we’ve always done it that way” justifications. One story goes that Beth wanted to cook a pot roast according to an award-winning pot roast recipe handed down in her husband’s family. Her husband, Abdul, said that his mother had taught him to sprinkle it with salt and pepper, cut both ends off, put it in the pan, cover it, and cook it. Beth asked, “Why do you cut both ends off?” Abdul said, “I don’t know. I’ve always done it that way. Let me ask my mother.” He called her, and she said, “I don’t know. I’ve always done it that way. Let me ask your grandmother.” She called his grandmother, who said, “I don’t know why you do it that way. I did it that way because it was too big to fit in my pan.” What are some other examples of this?

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• Are the famous websites handmade? [closed]

  - by Mithun Chuckraverthy

  I'm a newbie in web designing. I always wanted to build a professional quality website by myself. So, I started learning HTML/XHTML and CSS for presentation; and, JavaScript and PHP/MySQL for scripting. I wonder, would the developers of famous websites design them by hand? Or, have they found out any better idea of using softwares? If so, can you tell me what are they? (By the word famous, I mean any websites that are liked by millions of people all over the world. Like: Google, Facebook etc.) Thanks in advance!

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• What to answer to a customer who asks which one of two equivalent technologies must be used?

  - by MainMa

  As a freelancer, I am often asked by my customers what they must choose between similar elements, neither of which being better than another. Examples: “Do I need my e-commerce website be in PHP or ASP.NET?” “Do I need to host this ordinary web service in Cloud or use an ordinary hosting service?” “Which one is better for my new website: MySQL or Oracle?” etc. There is maybe at most 1% of cases where the choice is relevant, and there is a real, objective reason to use one over another, based on the precise metrics and studies. In all other cases, it doesn't matter at all. It is totally, completely irrelevant, either because there are no implications¹, or because those implications are too small to be taken in account², or, finally, because it's impossible to predict those implications³. If you know one thing and not another one, the answer to those questions is easy: “You can either write the application in C# or Java, both being probably equivalent in your case. Note that I'm a C# developer, so if you choose Java, I would not be able to work on your project and you would need to find another freelancer.” When you know both technologies, you can't answer that. In this case, how to explain to the customer that the question he asks is subject to flamewar and has no real consequences on his project? In other words, how to explain that you've chosen to use one technology rather than an equivalent one for the reasons related to human resources, without giving the impression to be unprofessional or to not care about the project? ¹ Example: Is MySQL better (worse?), performance-wise, compared to Oracle, for a personal website which will be accessed by, oh, let's be optimistic, two people per day? ² Example: for a given project, I was asked to asset if Windows Azure hosting would be cheaper than the hosting of the same application on a well-known ASP.NET hosting provider. The cost revealed to be exactly the same. ³ Example: your customer have an idea of a future application (the idea itself being extremely vague). There is no business plan, no requirements, nothing at all. Just an idea. You are asked if Java is better than C# for this app. What do you answer?

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• Can it be useful to build an application starting with the GUI?

  - by Grant Palin

  The trend in application design and development seems to be starting with the "guts": the domain, then data access, then infrastructure, etc. The GUI seems to usually come later in the process. I wonder if it could ever be useful to build the GUI first... My rationale is that by building at least a prototype GUI, you gain a better idea of what needs to happen behind the scenes, and so are in a better position to start work on the domain and supporting code. I can see an issue with this practice in that if the supporting code is not yet written, there won't be much for the GUI layer to actually do. Perhaps building mock objects or throwaway classes (somewhat like is done in unit testing) would provide just enough of a foundation to build the GUI on initially. Might this be a feasible idea for a real project? Maybe we could add GDD (GUI Driven Development) to the acronym stable...

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• Looking for a real-world example illustrating that composition can be superior to inheritance

  - by Job

  I watched a bunch of lectures on Clojure and functional programming by Rich Hickey as well as some of the SICP lectures, and I am sold on many concepts of functional programming. I incorporated some of them into my C# code at a previous job, and luckily it was easy to write C# code in a more functional style. At my new job we use Python and multiple inheritance is all the rage. My co-workers are very smart but they have to produce code fast given the nature of the company. I am learning both the tools and the codebase, but the architecture itself slows me down as well. I have not written the existing class hierarchy (neither would I be able to remember everything about it), and so, when I started adding a fairly small feature, I realized that I had to read a lot of code in the process. At the surface the code is neatly organized and split into small functions/methods and not copy-paste-repetitive, but the flip side of being not repetitive is that there is some magic functionality hidden somewhere in the hierarchy chain that magically glues things together and does work on my behalf, but it is very hard to find and follow. I had to fire up a profiler and run it through several examples and plot the execution graph as well as step through a debugger a few times, search the code for some substring and just read pages at the time. I am pretty sure that once I am done, my resulting code will be short and neatly organized, and yet not very readable. What I write feels declarative, as if I was writing an XML file that drives some other magic engine, except that there is no clear documentation on what the XML should look like and what the engine does except for the existing examples that I can read as well as the source code for the 'engine'. There has got to be a better way. IMO using composition over inheritance can help quite a bit. That way the computation will be linear rather than jumping all over the hierarchy tree. Whenever the functionality does not quite fit into an inheritance model, it will need to be mangled to fit in, or the entire inheritance hierarchy will need to be refactored/rebalanced, sort of like an unbalanced binary tree needs reshuffling from time to time in order to improve the average seek time. As I mentioned before, my co-workers are very smart; they just have been doing things a certain way and probably have an ability to hold a lot of unrelated crap in their head at once. I want to convince them to give composition and functional as opposed to OOP approach a try. To do that, I need to find some very good material. I do not think that a SCIP lecture or one by Rich Hickey will do - I am afraid it will be flagged down as too academic. Then, simple examples of Dog and Frog and AddressBook classes do not really connivence one way or the other - they show how inheritance can be converted to composition but not why it is truly and objectively better. What I am looking for is some real-world example of code that has been written with a lot of inheritance, then hit a wall and re-written in a different style that uses composition. Perhaps there is a blog or a chapter. I am looking for something that can summarize and illustrate the sort of pain that I am going through. I already have been throwing the phrase "composition over inheritance" around, but it was not received as enthusiastically as I had hoped. I do not want to be perceived as a new guy who likes to complain and bash existing code while looking for a perfect approach while not contributing fast enough. At the same time, my gut is convinced that inheritance is often the instrument of evil and I want to show a better way in a near future. Have you stumbled upon any great resources that can help me?

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• Is slower performance, of programming languages, really, a bad thing?

  - by Emanuil

  Here's how I see it. There's machine code and it's all that computers needs in order to run something. Computers don't care about programming languages. It doesn't matter to them whether the machine code comes from Perl, Python or PHP. Programming languages don't serve computers. They serve programmers. Some programming languages run slower than others but that's not necessarily because there is something wrong with them. In many cases, it's because they do more things that programmers would otherwise have to do (i.e. memory management) and by doing these things, they are better in what they are supposed to do - serve programmers. So, is slower performance, of programming languages, really, a bad thing?

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• What is the single most effective thing you did to improve your programming skills?

  - by Oded

  Looking back at my career and life as a programmer, there were plenty of different ways I improved my programming skills - reading code, writing code, reading books, listening to podcasts, watching screencasts and more. My question is: What is the most effective thing you have done that improved your programming skills? What would you recommend to others that want to improve? I do expect varied answers here and no single "one size fits all" answer - I would like to know what worked for different people. Edit: Wow - what great answers! Keep 'em coming people!!!

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• I'm Sick of Web Development - What avenues are open to me ...?

  - by 5arx

  I've been working as a web developer since 1998, mostly with ASP/ASP.Net/C# but began as a Java coder (JSP mostly). Its been fun but now I'm feeling jaded and can see the need for a change. I've considered iOS/Cocoa development and Android development recently (Objective-C looks hard while I'm a former Java developer) but I'm not sure of Career opportunities being proficient in either would afford The incline of the learning curve - I just turned 40 and I know I'm not as sharp or as quick as I once was. Does anyone have any experiences/ opinions/ advice for me? Thanks.

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• I've been told that Exceptions should only be used in exceptional cases. How do I know if my case is exceptional?

  - by tieTYT

  My specific case here is that the user can pass in a string into the application, the application parses it and assigns it to structured objects. Sometimes the user may type in something invalid. For example, their input may describe a person but they may say their age is "apple". Correct behavior in that case is roll back the transaction and to tell the user an error occurred and they'll have to try again. There may be a requirement to report on every error we can find in the input, not just the first. In this case, I argued we should throw an exception. He disagreed, saying, "Exceptions should be exceptional: It's expected that the user may input invalid data, so this isn't an exceptional case" I didn't really know how to argue that point, because by definition of the word, he seems to be right. But, it's my understanding that this is why Exceptions were invented in the first place. It used to be you had to inspect the result to see if an error occurred. If you failed to check, bad things could happen without you noticing. Without exceptions every level of the stack needs to check the result of the methods they call and if a programmer forgets to check in one of these levels, the code could accidentally proceed and save invalid data (for example). Seems more error prone that way. Anyway, feel free to correct anything I've said here. My main question is if someone says Exceptions should be exceptional, how do I know if my case is exceptional?

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• How do I add English-UK thesaurus in LibreOffice?

  - by Chethan S.

  I have been trying to use English-UK thesaurus in LibreOffice but so far cannot get it to work. I have installed mythes-en-us as only it was available in repos. As suggested in some forums I searched for openoffice.org thesaurus, but again US version was available. As a result I can't enable thesaurus when I choose English UK: As instructed elsewhere I tried this: cd /usr/share/myspell/dicts sudo ln -s th_en_US_v2.dat th_en_GB_v2.dat sudo ln -s th_en_US_v2.idx th_en_GB_v2.idx Still the result is same as shown in above screenshots. What can be done now?

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• Harmful temptations in programming

  - by gaearon

  Just curious, what kinds of temptations in programming turned out to be really harmful in your projects? Like when you really feel the urge to do something and you believe it's going to benefit the project or else you just trick yourself into believing it is, and after a week you realize you haven't solved any real problems but instead created new ones or, in the best case, pleased your inner beast with no visible impact. Personally, I find it very hard to not refactor bad code. I work with a lot of bad legacy code, and it takes some deep breaths to not touch it when I have no tests to prove my refactoring doesn't not break anything. Another demon for me in user interface, I can literally spend hours changing UI layout just because I enjoy doing it. Sometimes I tell myself I'm working on usability, but the truth is just I love moving buttons around. What are your programming demons, and how do you avoid them?

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