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Teacher demands excessive/unjustified use of Design Patterns

- by SoboLAN

I study computer science and I have a class called "Programming Techniques". Its purpose is to teach (us) good object oriented design principles. During the semester we have homeworks, programs that we must write to demonstrate what we've learned. The lab assistant demands for each of these homeworks that specific design patterns should be used. For example, the current homework is an application used for processing customer orders. We are demanded to use either "Factory Method" or "Abstract Factory" design patterns for this. It gets even worse: at the end of the semester we must write a program (something more complex) that must use at least one creational pattern, at least one structural pattern and at least one behavioural pattern. Is it normal to demand this ? I mean, forcing us to design our programs in such a way that a specific design pattern makes sense is just beyond what I consider ok. If I'm a car mechanic and have a huge tool box, then I will use a certain tool from that box if and when the situation demands it. Not more, not less. If my design of the application doesn't demand at all the use of "Abstract Factory" (for example), then why should I implement it ? I'm not sure yet if the senior lecturer agrees with what the lab assistant is demanding, but I want to talk to him about it and I need solid arguments to do so. How should I approach this problem with him ? PS: I'm sure there must be a better way to teach us these things. Maybe making us each week read about 3 design patterns and the next week giving us a test with small but specific programming or architectural situations/problems. The goal in that test would be to identify what design patterns would make sense and how they could be implemented. This way, he can see if we understand them. EDIT: These homeworks are not just 100-line programs, they have quite a lot of requirements and are fairly complicated. This is the reason we have about 2 - 3 weeks of deadline for each of them. I agree that practicing this is the best way to learn. But shouldn't smaller programs/applications be used for this ? Something just for demonstrating purposes. Not big programs with lots of requirements/classes/etc.

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Programming by dictation?

- by Andrew M

ie. you speak out the code, and someone else across the room types it in Anyone tried this? Obviously the person taking the dictation would need to be a coder too, so you didn't have to explain everything and go into tedious detail (not 'open bracket, new line...' but more like 'create a new class called myParser that takes three arguments, first one is...'). I thought of it because sometimes I'm too easily distracted at my computer. Surrounded by buttons, instant gratification a click away, the world at my fingertips. To get stuff done, I want to get away, write my code on paper. But that would mean losing access to necessary resources, and necessitate tedious typing-up later on. The solution? Dictate. Pros: no chance to check reddit, stackexchange, gmail, etc. code while you pace the room, lie down, play billiards, whatever train your brain to think more abstractedly (have to visualize things if you can't just see the screen) skip the tedious details (closing brackets etc.) the typist gets to shadow a more experienced programmer and learn how they work the typist can provide assistance/suggestions external pressure of typist expecting instructions, urging you to stay focussed Cons might be too hard might not work any better rather inefficient use of assisting programmer need to find/pay someone to do this

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Why are PHP function signatures so inconsistent?

- by Shamim Hafiz

I was going through some PHP functions and I could not help notice the following: <?php function foo(&$var) { } foo($a); // $a is "created" and assigned to null $b = array(); foo($b['b']); var_dump(array_key_exists('b', $b)); // bool(true) $c = new StdClass; foo($c->d); var_dump(property_exists($c, 'd')); // bool(true) ?> Notice the array_key_exists() and property_exists() function. In the first one, the property name(key for an array) is the first parameter while in the second one it is the second parameter. By intuition, one would expect them to have similar signature. This can lead to confusion and the development time may be wasted by making corrections of this type. Shouldn't PHP, or any language for that matter, consider making the signatures of related functions consistent?

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Does the LGPL allow me to do this?

- by user1229892

I am planning to develop a commercial software using a LGPL software. In the LGPL software that I am using some functions in a class are not fully implemented. I want to modify the LGPL code so that the class and not-implemented functions are made visible outside the dll by adding dllexport infront of class and by adding virtual keyword infront of function. Then I plan to implement those functions in my proprietary software. I am ready to distribute the modified LGPL code but not proprietary software that implements functions in the way I want. Does that violate LGPL terms and conditions?

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Am I copy/paste programmer ?

- by Searock

When ever I am stuck with a particular problem, I search for a solution in Google. And then I try to understand the code and tweak it according to my requirement. For example recently I had asked a question Reading xml document in firefox in stack overflow. Soufiane Hassou gave me a link to w3schools, where I found a example on parsing xml document, I understood how the example works, but I copied the code and tweaked it according to my requirement, since I don't like typing much. So does this make me a copy/paste programmer? How do you say if a person is a copy/paste programmer ? Thanks.

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Why PHP Function Naming so Inconsistent?

- by Shamim Hafiz

I was going through some PHP functions and I could not help notice the following: <?php function foo(&$var) { } foo($a); // $a is "created" and assigned to null $b = array(); foo($b['b']); var_dump(array_key_exists('b', $b)); // bool(true) $c = new StdClass; foo($c->d); var_dump(property_exists($c, 'd')); // bool(true) ?> Notice the array_key_exists() and property_exists() function. In the first one, the property name(key for an array) is the first parameter while in the second one it is the second parameter. By intuition, one would expect them to have similar signature. This can lead to confusion and the development time may be wasted by making corrections of this type. Shouldn't PHP, or any language for that matter, consider making the signatures of related functions consistent?

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How to convince my boss that quality is a good thing to have in code?

- by Kristof Claes

My boss came to me today to ask me if we could implement a certain feature in 1.5 days. I had a look at it and told him that 2 to 3 days would be more realistic. He then asked me: "And what if we do it quick and dirty?" I asked him to explain what he meant with "quick and dirty". It turns out, he wants us to write code as quickly as humanly possible by (for example) copying bits and pieces from other projects, putting all code in the code-behind of the WebForms pages, stop caring about DRY and SOLID and assuming that the code and functionalities will never ever have to be modified or changed. What's even worse, he doesn't want us do it for just this one feature, but for all the code we write. We can make more profit when we do things quick and dirty. Clients don't want to pay for you taking into account that something might change in the future. The profits for us are in delivering code as quick as possible. As long as the application does what it needs to do, the quality of the code doesn't matter. They never see the code. I have tried to convince him that this is a bad way to think as the manager of a software company, but he just wouldn't listen to my arguments: Developer motivation: I explained that it is hard to keep developers motivated when they are constantly under pressure of unrealistic deadlines and budget to write sloppy code very quickly. Readability: When a project gets passed on to another developer, cleaner and better structured code will be easier to read and understand. Maintainability: It is easier, safer and less time consuming to adapt, extend or change well written code. Testability: It is usually easier to test and find bugs in clean code. My co-workers are as baffled as I am by my boss' standpoint, but we can't seem to get to him. He keeps on saying that by making things more quickly, we can sell more projects, ask a lower price for them while still making a bigger profit. And in the end these projects pay the developer's salaries. What more can I say to make him see he is wrong? I want to buy him copies of Peopleware and The Mythical Man-Month, but I have a feeling they won't change his mind either. A lot of you will probably say something like "Run! Get out of there now!" or "I'd quit!", but that's not really an option since .NET web development jobs are rather rare in the region where I live...

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The best Drupal and JavaScript developer?

- by hakanito

I've read a lot of JS articles and books by Nicholas Zakas and Addy Osmani, in my opinion evangelists in the field. But I am also a Drupal developer, and these guys are not. Many of the techniques they're talking about such as AMD and RequireJS are great, but it's hard to know how to integrate them when it comes to Drupal (and do it right, ofc). So my question is if there are any recognized developer/s out there with strong JavaScript AND Drupal experience?

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How to sync files between local dir and remote dir without using an IDE?

- by Moe Sweet

I'm running windows 7 and I have a working dir in my PC. I have my staging server that I only have FTPS (Explicit) access to. What I want... Everytime I change something in my local dir, I want my remote dir synced via FTPS method alone. SVN, CVS, GIT is not an option. I tried notepad++, eclipse and Netbeans and all couldn't work. In general, I don't want to rely on an IDE to achieve this task. And I don't want to install anything funny like rsync and I don't want to write scripts.

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Which web framework to use under Backbonejs?

- by egidra

For a previous project, I was using Backbonejs alongside Django, but I found out that I didn't use many features from Django. So, I am looking for a lighter framework to use underneath a Backbonejs web app. I never used Django built in templates. When I did, it was to set up the initial index page, but that's all. I did use the user management system that Django provided. I used the models.py, but never views.py. I used urls.py to set up which template the user would hit upon visiting the site. I noticed that the two features that I used most from Django was South and Tastypie, and they aren't even included with Django. Particularly, django-tastypie made it easy for me to link up my frontend models to my backend models. It made it easy to JSONify my front end models and send them to Tastypie. Although, I found myself overriding a lot of tastypie's methods for GET, PUT, POST requests, so it became useless. South made it easy to migrate new changes to the database. Although, I had so much trouble with South. Is there a framework with an easier way of handling database modifications than using South? When using South with multiple people, we had the worse time keeping our databases synced. When someone added a new table and pushed their migration to git, the other two people would spend days trying to use South's automatic migration, but it never worked. I liked how Rails had a manual way of migrating databases. Even though I used Tastypie and South a lot, I found myself not actually liking them because I ended up overriding most Tastypie methods for each Resource, and I also had the worst trouble migrating new tables and columns with South. So, I would like a framework that makes that process easier. Part of my problem was that they are too "magical". Which framework should I use? Nodejs or a lighter Python framework? Which works best with my above criteria?

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Advice for beginner programmer

- by user3461957

I am beginner in software development. I noticed when I try to learn one technology let's say .NET I loose my grip over other for example Java. I thought it would be better to concentrate on one technology either Java or .NET to make significant advancement and be an expert, because they can be many details which one can ignore when keeps on changing between technologies. Is my decision right? Do experts choose this approach? Update: Should I pursue my career knowing one technology or not?

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Learning to be a good developer: what parts can you skip over?

- by Andrew M

I have set myself the goal of becoming a decent developer by this time next year. By this I mean full experience of the development 'lifecycle,' a few good apps/sites/webapps under my belt, and most importantly being able to work at a steady pace without getting sidelined for hours by some should-know-this-already technique. I'm not starting from scratch. I've written a lot of html/css, SQL, javascript, python and VB.net, and studied other languages like C and Java. I know about things like OOP, design patterns, TDD, complexity, computational linguistics, pointers/references, functional programming, and other academic/theoretical matters. It's just I can't say I've really done these things yet. So I want to get up to speed, and I want to know what things I can leave till a later date. For instance, studying algorithms and the maths behind them is interesting and all, but so far I've hardly needed to write anything but the most basic nested loops. Investigating Assembly to have a clearer picture of low-level operations would be cool... but I imagine rarely infringes on daily work. On the other hand, looking at a functional programming language might help me write programs that are more comprehensible and less prone to hidden failures (at the moment I'm finding the biggest difficulty is when the complexity of the app exceeds my capacity to understand it - for instance passing data around was fine... until I had to start doing it with AJAX, which was a painful step up). I could spend time working through case studies of design patterns, but I'm not sure how many of them get used in 'real life.' I'm a programmer with basic abilities - what skills should I focus on developing? (also my Unix skills are very weak, and also knowledge of Windows configuration... not sure how much time I should spend on that)

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Looking for Application Framework Features Lists, Comparisons and Guides [closed]

- by Blah McBlah

I am looking for lists of the things that application frameworks can do and for websites that have matrices, marketing content, blog articles and whatnot for comparing application frameworks to each other or just selling a framework. I'm talking generally, so regardless of coded language or operating system or client device. I want it all. I've found a few online, and would appreciate whatever sources I can glean from this site too.

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Resources needed: basics of using make/qmake

- by Mikey

I am look for a good book or website that clearly explains the basics of using make, (particularly qmake for Qt development) makefiles, etc. for building C++/Qt executables. I am using open source tools on Ubuntu. Lately have been doing a lot of Qt/C++ development using the CodeLite IDE, which works quite well with Qt, however when I wanted to write my own QObject derivatives with custom signal and slots, I discovered I had to use qmake and I don't know how. (Meanwhile I have been using QtCreator, which handles this, but it not my IDE of choice) I have several books on C++ and Qt but I haven't found that they focus at all on this area. Recommendations please...

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Web application framework for embedded systems?

- by datenwolf

I'm currently developing the software for a measurement and control system. In addition to the usual SCPI interface I'd also give it a nice HTTP frontend. Now I don't want to reinvent the wheel all over again. I already have a simple HTTPD running, but I don't want to implement all the other stuff. So what I'm looking for is a web application toolkit targeted at embedded system development. In particular this has to run on a ARM Cortex-M4, and I have some 8k of RAM available for this. It must be written in C. Is there such a thing or do I have to implement this myself?

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Ashamed to admit using jQuery?

- by Matt Stevens

Something I've noticed over the past few weeks is how many big commercial websites use jQuery combined with lots of plugins - but don't admit it. They will rename the main library to something obscure, as well as the plugins. Quite a few will even remove the comments that contain the MIT/GPL license information. (just noticed today that odeon.co.uk have done exactly this) Why are they doing this? are they abashed by the face that they are using a free and open source library?

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When should I make the first commit to source control?

- by Kendall Frey

I'm never sure when a project is far enough along to first commit to source control. I tend to put off committing until the project is 'framework-complete' and primarily commit features from then on. (I haven't done any personal projects large enough to have a core framework too big for this.) I have a feeling this isn't best practice, though I'm not sure what all could go wrong. Let's say, for example, I have a project which consists of a single code file. It will take about 10 lines of boilerplate code, and 100 lines to get the project working with extremely basic functionality (1 or 2 features). Should I first check in: The empty file? The boilerplate code? The first features? At some other point? Also, what are the reasons to check in at a specific point?

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What are the advantages of Maven when it comes to single man, educational projects

- by Leron

I've spend a few hours playing around with Maven + reading some stuff on the apache official site and also a few random googled articles. By this I mean that I really tried to find the answers myself - both by reading and by doing things on my own. Also maybe worth to mention that I installed the m2e plugin so most of the time I've tried things out from Eclipse and not using the command line too much. However aside from the generated project that for example prevent me from using the default package I didn't see that much of a difference with the standard way I've created my projects before try Maven. In fact I've almost decided to skip Maven for now and move on to the other technology I wanted to learn more in-depth - Hibernate, but when I start with opening the official page the first thing I've read was the recommendation to use Hibernate with Maven. That get me confused and made me taking a step back and trying once more to find what I'm obviously missing right now. As it's said in the maven.apache.. site, the true strength of Maven is shown when you work on large projects with other people, but I lack the option to see how Maven is really used in this scenario, still i think that there are maybe advantages even when it comes to working with small projects alone, but I really have difficulties to point them out. So what do you think are the advantages of Maven when it's used for small projects writing from a single person. What are the things that I should be aware of and try to exploit (I mean features offered by Maven) that can come in handy in this situations?

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javac -cp : cannot find symbol problem [migrated]

- by LivingThing

I have 3 classes CustomerAddress, Customer and CustomerMain. Customer has a import statement : import org.abc.customers.CustomerAddress; While CustomerMain has an import statement : import org.abc.customers.CustomerAddress; import org.abc.customers.Customer; The package for all of these classes are package org.abc.customer Now, this program works fine on eclipse but when i try to compile and run on cmd prompt it would not compile javac CustomerAddress.java compiles fine then since Customer depends on CustomerAddress i give javac -cp . Customer.java but the compiler complains error cannot find symbol CustomerAddress Thanks

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What defines good developer culture? [closed]

- by Sven

We are a team of 6 people developing applications for mobile devices (Android & iOS). In our company, which consists of many teams responsible for "classic" software development, business intelligence, virtualization, hardware, etc., we are kind of a small startup because we were the first to use agile methods like Scrum and we are open to new technologies and methods. Also our team is pretty young with me being the oldest with 30 years. We would like to further raise productivity and motivation and thus are currently collecting points which make up a good developer/hacker culture and which may be improved in our team/company. This can be points that we can either improve ourselves or have to pass on to management. I would like to know what in your opinion defines good, modern developer culture? What does developer culture consists of? For example is it clearly defined career opportunities geeky office benefits like trips to extraordinary conferences like WWDC or Google I/O ...

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How can I avoid team burnout?

- by Shawn Dalma

I work for a small web company that deals with a lot of projects, a few at any given time are development heavy for us (400-1500 hours or more) and I've been noticing developers get extremely burnt out on a project after 150 hours or so. I've been toying around with the idea of working some form of rotation/rest so when someone reaches the threshold, they at least get some time off of working on that project. Is there an industry standard approach?

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data handling with javascript

- by Vincent Warmerdam

Python has a very neat package called pandas which allows for quick data transformation; tables, aggregation, that sort of thing. A lot of these types of functionality can also be found in the python itertools module. The plyR package in R is also very similar. Usually one woud use this functionality to produce a table which is later visualized with a plot. I am personally very fond of d3, and I would like to allow the user to first indicate what type of data aggregation he wants on the dataset before it is visualized. The visualisation in question involves making a heatmap where the user gets to select the size of the bins of the heatmap beforehand (I want d3 to project this through leaflet). I want to visually select the ideal size of the bins for the heatmap. The way I work now is that I take the dataset, aggregate it with python and then manually load it in d3. This is a process that takes a lot of human effort and I was wondering if the data aggregation can be done through the javascript of the browser. I couldn't find a package for javascript specifically built for data, suggesting (to me) that this is a bad idea and that one should not use javascript for the data handling. Is there a good module/package for javascript to handle data aggregation? Is it a good/bad idea to do the data aggregation in javascript (performance wise)?

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Bad style programming, am I pretending too much?

- by Luca

I realized to work in an office with a quite bad code base. The base library implemented in years and years is quite limited, and most of that code is, honestly, horrible. Projects developed in the office are very large. Fine. I could define me a "perfectionist" (but often I'm not), and I thought to refactor an application (really a portion), which need a new (complex) feature. But, today, I really realized that it's not possible to refactor that application modules with a reasonable time (say, 24/26 hours, respect the avaialable time for the task, which is 160 hours). I'm talking about (I am a bit ashamed to say) name collisions, large and frequent cut & paste code, horrible and misleading naming, makefiles without dependencies (!), application login is spread randomly across many different sources, dead code, variable aliasing, no assertion, no documentation, very long source files, bad/incomplete include file definition, (this is emblematic!) very frequent extern declaration of variables and functions, ... I'm sure to continue ... buffer overflows because sprintf, indentation (!), spacing, non existent const modifier usage. I would say that every source line was written quite randomly when needed, without keeping in mind some design (at least, the obvious one). (Am I in hell?) The problem arises when the application is developed by a colleague of mine. I felt very frustrated. So, I decided to expose the "situation" to my colleague; at the end, that was a bad idea. He is justified in saying that "the application was developed in haste, so it is natural that it is written vaguely; you are wasting time to think and implement an elegant implementation" .... I'm asking too much from my colleague to write readable code, which is managed and documented? I expect too much in not having to read thousands of lines of code to understand how a particular logic?

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How advanced are author-recognition methods?

- by Nick Rtz

From a written text by an author if a computer program analyses the text, how much can a computer program tell today about the author of some (long enough to be statistically significant) texts? Can the computer program even tell with "certainty" whether a man or a woman wrote this text based solely on the contents of the text and not an investigation such as ip numbers etc? I'm interested to know if there are algorithms in use for instance to automatically know whether an author was male or female or similar characteristics of an author that a computer program can decide based on analyses of the written text by an author. It could be useful to know before you read a message what a computer analyses says about the author, do you agree? If I for instance get a longer message from my wife that she has had an accident in Nigeria and the computer program says that with 99 % probability the message was written by a male author in his sixties of non-caucasian origin or likewise, or by somebody who is not my wife, then the computer program could help me investigate why a certain message differs in characteristics. There can also be other uses for instance just detecting outliers in a geographically or demographically bounded larger data set. Scam detection is the obvious use I'm thinking of but there could also be other uses. Are there already such programs that analyse a written text to tell something about the author based on word choice, use of pronouns, unusual language usage, or likewise?

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"My stuff" vs. "Your stuff" in UI texts

- by JD Isaacks

When refering to a users stuff should you use My or Your, for example: My Cart | My Account | My Wishlist Or Your Cart | Your Account | Your Wishlist I found this article that argues for the use of your. It says flikr does this. It also says MySpace and MyYahoo are wrong. I also noticed today that Amazon uses the term Your. However, I have heard they are the masters at testing variations and finding the best one, so what you see on their site might be the best variation, or simply something they are currently testing. I personally like the way my looks better, but thats just my opinion. What do you think? What will hever the better impact on customers? Does it really even matter?

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