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• What is the value in hiding the details through abstractions? Isn't there value in transparency?

  - by user606723

  Background I am not a big fan of abstraction. I will admit that one can benefit from adaptability, portability and re-usability of interfaces etc. There is real benefit there, and I don't wish to question that, so let's ignore it. There is the other major "benefit" of abstraction, which is to hide implementation logic and details from users of this abstraction. The argument is that you don't need to know the details, and that one should concentrate on their own logic at this point. Makes sense in theory. However, whenever I've been maintaining large enterprise applications, I always need to know more details. It becomes a huge hassle digging deeper and deeper into the abstraction at every turn just to find out exactly what something does; i.e. having to do "open declaration" about 12 times before finding the stored procedure used. This 'hide the details' mentality seems to just get in the way. I'm always wishing for more transparent interfaces and less abstraction. I can read high level source code and know what it does, but I'll never know how it does it, when how it does it, is what I really need to know. What's going on here? Has every system I've ever worked on just been badly designed (from this perspective at least)? My philosophy When I develop software, I feel like I try to follow a philosophy I feel is closely related to the ArchLinux philosophy: Arch Linux retains the inherent complexities of a GNU/Linux system, while keeping them well organized and transparent. Arch Linux developers and users believe that trying to hide the complexities of a system actually results in an even more complex system, and is therefore to be avoided. And therefore, I never try to hide complexity of my software behind abstraction layers. I try to abuse abstraction, not become a slave to it. Question at heart Is there real value in hiding the details? Aren't we sacrificing transparency? Isn't this transparency valuable?

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• What is the origin of the name string? [closed]

  - by Andrej M.

  Possible Duplicate: Etymology of “String” Every programmer knows the meaning of the name string. In programming, it is traditionally a sequence of characters. But historically, who has decided that a sequence of characters will be called a string? Has there ever been an attempt to name a sequence of characters differently, but was ultimately abandoned due to the rising popularity of the name string?

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• Multithreaded UI desktop application issues

  - by igor

  I am involved into development a rich UI project: desktop windows application. Application uses asynchronous invocations and in its turn it should be ready to process external messages (events). The problem is clear: at first time it was built as a simple prototype and it was not stress tested and all was fine. Then application was grown: the number of calls to server and number of events from server are high and performance is low. What is more users noticed that sometimes performance is extremal low. Asynchronous invocations based on thread pool (BeginInvoke, EndInvoke), external events are going from WCF service (.NET 3.5). My goal is synchronization of all tasks and putting priorities to every executions in desktop application. My question is: is there any practice how to reach my goal: patterns, task priority list, others? What should I do at first, second and next times? Thanks

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• Can You Have "Empty" Abstract/Classes?

  - by ShrimpCrackers

  Of course you can, I'm just wondering if it's rational to design in such a way. I'm making a breakout clone and was doing some class design. I wanted to use inheritance, even though I don't have to, to apply what I've learned in C++. I was thinking about class design and came up with something like this: GameObject - base class (consists of data members like x and y offsets, and a vector of SDL_Surface* MovableObject : GameObject - abstract class + derived class of GameObject (one method void move() = 0; ) NonMovableObject : GameObject - empty class...no methods or data members other than constructor and destructor(at least for now?). Later I was planning to derive a class from NonMovableObject, like Tileset : NonMovableObject. I was just wondering if "empty" abstract classes or just empty classes are often used...I notice that the way I'm doing this, I'm just creating the class NonMovableObject just for sake of categorization. I know I'm overthinking things just to make a breakout clone, but my focus is less on the game and more on using inheritance and designing some sort of game framework.

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• Array Multiplication and Division

  - by Narfanator

  I came across a question that (eventually) landed me wondering about array arithmetic. I'm thinking specifically in Ruby, but I think the concepts are language independent. So, addition and subtraction are defined, in Ruby, as such: [1,6,8,3,6] + [5,6,7] == [1,6,8,3,6,5,6,7] # All the elements of the first, then all the elements of the second [1,6,8,3,6] - [5,6,7] == [1,8,3] # From the first, remove anything found in the second and array * scalar is defined: [1,2,3] * 2 == [1,2,3,1,2,3] But What, conceptually, should the following be? None of these are (as far as I can find) defined: Array x Array: [1,2,3] * [1,2,3] #=> ? Array / Scalar: [1,2,3,4,5] / 2 #=> ? Array / Scalar: [1,2,3,4,5] % 2 #=> ? Array / Array: [1,2,3,4,5] / [1,2] #=> ? Array / Array: [1,2,3,4,5] % [1,2] #=> ? I've found some mathematical descriptions of these operations for set theory, but I couldn't really follow them, and sets don't have duplicates (arrays do). Edit: Note, I do not mean vector (matrix) arithmetic, which is completely defined. Edit2: If this is the wrong stack exchange, tell me which is the right one and I'll move it. Edit 3: Add mod operators to the list. Edit 4: I figure array / scalar is derivable from array * scalar: a * b = c => a = b / c [1,2,3] * 3 = [1,2,3]+[1,2,3]+[1,2,3] = [1,2,3,1,2,3,1,2,3] => [1,2,3] = [1,2,3,1,2,3,1,2,3] / 3 Which, given that programmer's division ignore the remained and has modulus: [1,2,3,4,5] / 2 = [[1,2], [3,4]] [1,2,3,4,5] % 2 = [5] Except that these are pretty clearly non-reversible operations (not that modulus ever is), which is non-ideal. Edit: I asked a question over on Math that led me to Multisets. I think maybe extensible arrays are "multisets", but I'm not sure yet.

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• Logical progressions through the job market

  - by Philluminati

  I'm 5 years out of a unrecognised university where I did Software Engineering. First job was VB.NET, one job was Python, Linux and Web development. I feel cast as a web developer. I'd love a role doing C but no one is interested in juniors if the applicant hasn't got 3 years of C development experience already. I've done some C and a drop of open source coding but I'll never have the confidence to convince someone I know absolutely what I'm doing. Do I just spend more and more time letting life pass me by as I sit in my room on a friday night writing a C problem "for the sake of learning more C" Basically I'm just not sure I want to continue my career if it's going to involve nothing but high level, machine abstracted, business logic and as interested as I am in low level development and enjoy reading books by Taunembaum I struggle to see how I can make the jump and I just feel life would be easier if I got a job in a cafe in Amsterdam rolling spliffs for customers. My ideal job, being a paid member of the Fedora development team seems so far away, without anyone to pay me to learn the skills to get there, and the only way would be to literally spend weeks and weeks of my life contributing code without recognition for free and without any guarentees at the end. Not that I've contributed anything at all so far. Are there any career paths that are logically set out so that jumping between roles is "correctly" incremental and where hard work and learning does eventually lead to the kind of places I might want to go? [ and also getting paid at the same time? ]

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• Defensive Programming Techniques.

  - by Pemdas

  I was attempting to identify an element of software engineering that I think is overlooked, not emphasized or not taught in typical undergraduate course work for CS or SE. What I came up is the concept of defensive programing. I would like to hear the communities options on defensive program and/or specific techniques that you use on a regular basis. Also, I would to know if there are any language specific techniques.

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• When do you call yourself a programmer

  - by benhowdle89

  "A programmer, computer programmer or coder is someone who writes computer software" from Wikipedia If you do frontend development using jQuery/CSS/HTML do you call yourself a programmer? If you develop PHP applications that deal with databases, do you call yourself a programmer? Are you only a programmer if you write applications for desktops and mobiles? Is the web a place where the line between developer and programmer stops?

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• Load Balancer impact on web development

  - by confusedGeek

  This question has it's roots in a SharePoint site that I am help with. Background on the issue I dealt with: The dev box and integration server are not setup behind a load balancer. The links were being built using the HttpRequest.Url value from the current context. Note that the links weren't relative links but full URIs. Once we deployed to testing (which has a LB, amongst other things) we received errors on the links being built since the server had an address of "http://some.site.org:999" while the address at the LB as "https://site.org" (SSL was off-loaded at the LB). The fix was easy enough by using relative URIs. The Question: Since this is the first site I've worked with that's behind a Load Balancer on I'm wondering if there are other gotcha's that I need to consider when developing a site behind one?

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• Beta Testing iOS Application

  - by dbramhall

  I was wondering if it is advisable to get a small team of beta testers for an iOS application that will be released to the App Store. I am developing an iOS application and I have setup a beta application form however I was wondering if it is advisable to even do beta testing considering I am actively testing and using my application on all of my own iOS devices (iPad 2, 2 iPod Touches and an iPhone 4 (plus, of course iOS Simulator)) - all running various versions of iOS 4. My question is: would you advise someone to get beta testers for an iOS application and, if so, how would you advise them to go about getting testers. For those interested, my application is at http://affogato.visioa.com/

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• Rails/Node.js interaction

  - by lpvn

  I and my co-worker are developing a web application with rails and node.js and we can't reach a consensus regarding a particular architectural decision. Our setup is basically a rails server working with node.js and redis, when a client makes a http request to our rails API in some cases our rails application posts the response to a redis database and then node.js transmits the response via websocket. Our disagreement occurs in the following point: my co-worker thinks that using node.js to send data to clients is somewhat business logic and should be inside the model, so in the first code he wrote he used commands of broadcast in callbacks and other places of the model, he's convinced that the models are the best place for the interaction between rails and node. I on the other hand think that using node.js belongs to the runtime realm, my take is that the broadcast commands and other node.js interactions should be in the controller and should only be used in a model if passed through a well defined interface, just like the situation when a model needs to access the current user of a session. At this point we're tired of arguing over this same thing and our discussion consists in us repeating to ourselves our same opinions over and over. Could anyone, preferably with experience in the same setup, give us an unambiguous response saying which solution is more adequate and why it is?

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• How to become a better programmer in 2011?

  - by Anish Patel

  Not strictly a Stack Overflow thing, but I thought I'd get it out there and ask the question. What are you as a programmer going to do to improve in 2011? The things I am planning to do are as follows: Learn Functional Programming Write 100 blog posts Take a bunch of Microsoft exams (70-433, 70-511, 70-513, 70-515, 70-516, 70-518, 70-519) Contribute to an open source project Lets hope the motivation lasts all year!

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• Can an issue tracking system be distributed?

  - by Klaim

  I was thinking about issue tracking software like Redmine, Trac or even the one that is in Fossil and something hit me: Is there a reason why Redmine and Trac are not possible to be distributed? Or maybe it's possible and I just don't know how it's possible? If it's not possible, why? By distributed I mean like Facebook or Google or other applications that effectively runs on multiple hardware a the same time but share data.

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• Useful certifications for a young programmer

  - by Alain

  As @Paddyslacker elegantly stated in Are certifications worth it? The main purpose of certifications is to make money for the certifying body. I am a fairly young developer, with only an undergraduate degree, and my job is (graciously) offering to sponsor some professional development of my choice (provided it can be argued that it will contribute to the quality of work I do for them). A search online offers a slew of (mostly worthless) certifications one can attain. I'm wondering if there are any that are actually recognized in the (North American) industry as an asset. My local university promoted CIPS (I.S.P., ITCP) at the time I was graduating, but for all I can tell it's just the one that happened to get its foot in the door. It's certainly money grubbing - with a $205 a year fee. So are there any such certifications that provide useful credentials? To better define 'useful' - would it benefit full time developers, or is it only something worth while to the self-employed? Would any certifications lead me to being considered for higher wages, or can that only be achieved with more experience and an higher-level degree?

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• So what *did* Alan Kay really mean by the term "object-oriented"?

  - by Charlie Flowers

  Reportedly, Alan Kay is the inventor of the term "object oriented". And he is often quoted as having said that what we call OO today is not what he meant. For example, I just found this on Google: I made up the term 'object-oriented', and I can tell you I didn't have C++ in mind -- Alan Kay, OOPSLA '97 I vaguely remember hearing something pretty insightful about what he did mean. Something along the lines of "message passing". Do you know what he meant? Can you fill in more details of what he meant and how it differs from today's common OO? Please share some references if you have any. Thanks.

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• Interfaces, Adapters, exposing business objects via WCF design

  - by Onam

  I know there have been countless discussions about this but I think this question is slightly different and may perhaps prompt a heated discussion (lets keep it friendly). The scene: I am developing a system as a means for me to learn various concepts and I came across a predicament which my brain is conflicting with. That is whether to keep my interfaces in a separate class library or should they live side by side my business objects. I want to expose certain objects via WCF, however refuse to expose them in its entirety. I am sure most will agree exposing properties such as IDs and other properties is not good practice but also I don't want to have my business objects decorated with attributes. The question: Essentially, I'll be having a separate interface for each of my objects that will essentially be exposed to the outside world (could end up being quite a few) so does it make sense to create a separate class library for interfaces? This also brings up the question of whether adapters should live in a separate class library too as ideally I want a mechanism from transferring from one object to the other and vice versa?

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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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• Is Google Closure a true compiler?

  - by James Allardice

  This question is inspired by the debate in the comments on this Stack Overflow question. The Google Closure Compiler documentation states the following (emphasis added): The Closure Compiler is a tool for making JavaScript download and run faster. It is a true compiler for JavaScript. Instead of compiling from a source language to machine code, it compiles from JavaScript to better JavaScript. However, Wikipedia gives the following definition of a "compiler": A compiler is a computer program (or set of programs) that transforms source code written in a programming language (the source language) into another computer language... A language rewriter is usually a program that translates the form of expressions without a change of language. Based on that, I would say that Google Closure is not a compiler. But the fact that Google explicitly state that it is in fact a "true compiler" makes me wonder if there's more to it. Is Google Closure really a JavaScript compiler?

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• Is hashing of just "username + password" as safe as salted hashing

  - by randomA

  I want to hash "user + password". EDIT: prehashing "user" would be an improvement, so my question is also for hashing "hash(user) + password". If cross-site same user is a problem then the hashing changed to hashing "hash(serviceName + user) + password" From what I read about salted hash, using "user + password" as input to hash function will help us avoid problem with reverse hash table hacking. The same thing can be said about rainbow table. Any reason why this is not as good as salted hashing?

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• Where and how to reference composite MVP components?

  - by Lea Hayes

  I am learning about the MVP (Model-View-Presenter) Passive View flavour of MVC. I intend to expose events from view interfaces rather than using the observer pattern to remove explicit coupling with presenter. Context: Windows Forms / Client-Side JavaScript. I am led to believe that the MVP (or indeed MVC in general) pattern can be applied at various levels of a user interface ranging from the main "Window" to an embedded "Text Field". For instance, the model to the text field is probably just a string whereas the model to the "Window" contains application specific view state (like a persons name which resides within the contained text field). Given a more complex scenario: Documentation viewer which contains: TOC navigation pane Document view Search pane Since each of these 4 user interface items are complex and can be reused elsewhere it makes sense to design these using MVP. Given that each of these user interface items comprises of 3 components; which component should be nested? where? who instantiates them? Idea #1 - Embed View inside View from Parent View public class DocumentationViewer : Form, IDocumentationViewerView { public DocumentationViewer() { ... // Unclear as to how model and presenter are injected... TocPane = new TocPaneView(); } protected ITocPaneView TocPane { get; private set; } } Idea #2 - Embed Presenter inside View from Parent View public class DocumentationViewer : Form, IDocumentationViewerView { public DocumentationViewer() { ... // This doesn't seem like view logic... var tocPaneModel = new TocPaneModel(); var tocPaneView = new TocPaneView(); TocPane = new TocPanePresenter(tocPaneModel, tocPaneView); } protected TocPanePresenter TocPane { get; private set; } } Idea #3 - Embed View inside View from Parent Presenter public class DocumentationViewer : Form, IDocumentationViewerView { ... // Part of IDocumentationViewerView: public ITocPaneView TocPane { get; set; } } public class DocumentationViewerPresenter { public DocumentationViewerPresenter(DocumentationViewerModel model, IDocumentationViewerView view) { ... var tocPaneView = new TocPaneView(); var tocPaneModel = new TocPaneModel(model.Toc); var tocPanePresenter = new TocPanePresenter(tocPaneModel, tocPaneView); view.TocPane = tocPaneView; } } Some better idea...

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• Is it a "pattern smell" to put getters like "FullName" or "FormattedPhoneNumber" in your model?

  - by DanM

  I'm working on an ASP.NET MVC app, and I've been getting into the habit of putting what seem like helpful and convenient getters into my model/entity classes. For example: public class Member { public int Id { get; set; } public string FirstName { get; set; } public string LastName { get; set; } public string PhoneNumber { get; set; } public string FullName { get { return FirstName + " " + LastName; } } public string FormattedPhoneNumber { get { return "(" + PhoneNumber.Substring(0, 3) + ") " + PhoneNumber.Substring(3, 3) + "-" + PhoneNumber.Substring(6); } } } I'm wondering people think about the FullName and FormattedPhoneNumber getters. They make it very easy to create standardized data formats throughout the app, and they seem to save a lot of repeated code, but it could definitely be argued that data format is something that should be handled in mapping from model to view-model. In fact, I was originally applying these data formats in my service layer where I do my mapping, but it was becoming a burden to constantly have to write formatters then apply them in many different places. E.g., I use "Full Name" in most views, and having to type something like model.FullName = MappingUtilities.GetFullName(entity.FirstName, entity.LastName); all over the place seemed a lot less elegant than just typing model.FullName = entity.FullName (or, if you use something like AutoMapper, potentially not typing anything at all). So, where do you draw the line when it comes to data formatting. Is it "okay" to do data formatting in your model or is that a "pattern smell"? Note: I definitely do not have any html in my model. I use html helpers for that. I'm strictly talking about formatting or combining data (and especially data that is frequently used).

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• How do you safely comment out code in Visual Studio and TFS?

  - by burnt1ce

  Once in a while, a co-worker check-ins bad code and this blocks you from your application from initializing properly so you can continue doing your work. To get around this problem quickly, I've commented out the offending code. I accidentally to uncomment out the offending code at the time of check-in and I want to prevent this from happening again. Do you have a trick to 1) disable bad code that stop you from working 2) prevent yourself from checking in unwanted changes? I'm currently using Visual Studio as my IDE and TFS as my source code repo.

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• Best practice with branching source code and application lifecycle

  - by Toni Frankola

  We are a small ISV shop and we usually ship a new version of our products every month. We use Subversion as our code repository and Visual Studio 2010 as our IDE. I am aware a lot of people are advocating Mercurial and other distributed source control systems but at this point I do not see how we could benefit from these, but I might be wrong. Our main problem is how to keep branches and main trunk in sync. Here is how we do things today: Release new version (automatically create a tag in Subversion) Continue working on the main trunk that will be released next month And the cycle repeats every month and works perfectly. The problem arises when an urgent service release needs to be released. We cannot release it from the main trunk (2) as it is under heavy development and it is not stable enough to be released urgently. In such case we do the following: Create a branch from the tag we created in step (1) Bug fix Test and release Push the change back to main trunk (if applicable) Our biggest problem is merging these two (branch with main). In most cases we cannot rely on automatic merging because e.g.: a lot of changes has been made to main trunk merging complex files (like Visual Studio XML files etc.) does not work very well another developer / team made changes you do not understand and you cannot just merge it So what you think is the best practice to keep these two different versions (branch and main) in sync. What do you do?

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• Is an undergraduate degree in CS required?

  - by Girish

  I will complete my undergrad in Material Science this spring. I am not interested in the subject but I am very interested in Computer Science and programming and have decided to make the shift. Do you think I should first get an undergraduate degree in Computer Science or should I apply for a master's program? My programming skills are pretty decent, but I lack a lot of concrete knowledge in algorithms and data structures? Will a master's degree help me with the basics?

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• Is my first employer expecting too much?

  - by priyank patel

  This is my first job as a programmer. I am working using the followig technologies: ASP.NET C# HTML CSS Javascript JQuery I work for a firm which develops software for small banking firms. Currently they have their software running in 100 firms. Their software is developed in Visual Fox Pro. I was hired to develop an online version of this software. I am the only developer. My boss is another developer, the only other developer in the firm. Therefore, my employer has a total of two developers. My boss does not have any experience with .NET development. I have been working on this project for 8 months. The progress is there, but has been very slow. I try my best to do what my boss asks. But the project just seems too ambitious for me. The company has not done have any planning for the project. They just ask me to develop what their older software provides. So I have to deal with front end, back end, review code, design architecture, and more. I have decided to give my best. I try a lot. But the project sometimes just seems to be overwhelming. Question: Is it normal for a beginner programmer to be in this place? Are my employers just expecting too much of a new programmer? As a programmer, am I lacking skills one needs to deal with this? I always feel the need to work in at least a small team, if not big one. I am just not able judge my condition. Also I am paid very low salary. I do work on Saturday as well. Please, help to clarify my judgment. Any suggestions are welcome.

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