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• Returning null vs Throwing exceptions

  - by Svish

  Is in a bit of disagreement with a more experienced developer on this issue, and was wondering what you guys here think about this. Environment is Java, EJB 3, services, etc. The code I wrote calls a service to get things and to create things. Problem was that I got null pointer exceptions in places that didn't make sense. For example when I asked the service to create an object, I got null back. And when I tried to look up an object with an id I knew existed, I still got null back. Was like it was ignoring me. Spent some time trying to figure out what was wrong in my code (since I'm less experienced I usually assume I have messed up). Turns out the reason was security. If the user principal using my service didn't have the right permissions to use the service I called from my service, then that service simply returned null. The services that are here already are usually not documented either, so this is just something you have to know... somehow... So here is the thing: I mean that this is rather confusing as a developer interacting with this service. To me it would make much more sense if that service thew an exception which would tell me that hey, you don't have the proper permissions to get info about this thing or to create this new thing. I would then immediately know why my service wasn't working as expected. However, he argued that asking is not wrong. Exceptions should only be thrown when there is an error and asking for a thing is not an error. Even if you don't have permission to "see" that the thing you asked for. The things are often looked up in a GUI by users and for those users not having the right permissions, these things simply "do not exist". So, in short: Asking is not wrong, hence no exception. Get methods return null because to those users those things "doesn't exist". Create methods return null because nothing was created, since the user wasn't allowed to create anything. So, what do you guys think? Is this normal and/or good practice? I prefer exceptions as I prefer throwing and catching exceptions because I find it much easier to know what's going on. So I would for example also prefer to throw a NotFoundException if you asked for an id which didn't exist, rather than returning null. Anyways, just curious to what others think about this as I'm not the most experienced developer yet.

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• Is it bad to have an "Obsessive Refactoring Disorder"?

  - by Rachel

  I was reading this question and realized that could almost be me. I am fairly OCD about refactoring someone else's code when I see that I can improve it. For example, if the code contains duplicate methods to do the same thing with nothing more than a single parameter changing, I feel I have to remove all the copy/paste methods and replace it with one generic one. Is this bad? Should I try and stop? I try not to refactor unless I can actually make improvements to the code performance or readability, or if the person who did the code isn't following our standard naming conventions (I hate expecting a variable to be local because of the naming standard, only to discover it is a global variable which has been incorrectly named)

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• What to watch out for when writing code at an Interview?

  - by Philip

  Hi, I have read that at a lot of companies you have to write code at an interview. On the one hand I see that it makes sense to ask for a work sample. On the other hand: What kind of code do you expect to be written in 5 minutes? And what if they tell me "Write an algorithm that does this and that" but I cannot think of a smart solution or even write code that doesn't semantically work? I am particularly interested in that question because I do not have that much commercial programming experience, 2 years part-time, one year full-time. (But I am interested in programming languages since nearly 15 years though usually I was more concentrated in playing with the language rather than writing large applications...) And actually I consider my debugging and problem solving skills much better than my coding skills. I sometimes see myself not writing the most beautiful code when looking back, but on the other hand I often come up with solutions for hard problems. And I think I am very good at optimizing, fixing, restructuring existing code, but I have problems with writing new applications from scratch. The software design sucks... ;-) Therefore I don't feel comfortable when thinking about this code writing situation at an interview... So what do the interviewers expect? What kind of information about my code writing are they interested in? Philip

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• Non-zero exit status for clean exit

  - by trinithis

  Is it acceptable to return a non-zero exit code if the program in question ran properly? For example, say I have a simple program that (only) does the following: Program takes N arguments. It returns an exit code of min(N, 255). Note that any N is valid for the program. A more realistic program might return different codes for successfully ran programs that signify different things. Should these programs instead write this information to a stream instead, such as to stdout?

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• A good interpreted language for a small embedded project

  - by Earlz

  I have an mbed which has a small ARM Cortex M3 on it. Basically, my effective resources for the project are ~25Kb of RAM and ~400Kb of Flash. For I/O I'll have a PS/2 keyboard, a VGA framebuffer(with character output), and an SD card for saving/loading programs(up to a couple of Mb maybe) The reason I ask this here is because I'm trying to figure out what programming language to implement on the thing. I'm looking for an interpreted language that's easy for me to implement, and won't break the bank on my resources. I also intend for this to be at least possible to write on th device itself, though the editor can be interpreted(yay bootstrapping) Anyway, I've looked at a few simple languages. Some nice candidates: Forth BASIC Scheme? Has anyone done something like this or know of any languages that can fit this bill or have comments about my three candidates so far?

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• What's a good, quick algorithms refresh?

  - by Casey Patton

  I have programming interviews coming up in a couple weeks. I took an algorithms class a while ago but likely forgot some key concepts. I'm looking for something like a very short book (< 100 pages) on algorithms to get back up to speed. Sorting algorithms, data structures, and any other essentials should be included. It doesn't have to be a book...just looking for a great way to get caught up in about a week. What's the best tool for a quick algorithms intro or refresher?

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• agile as our first project management methodology [closed]

  - by Hasan Khan

  we are a small web development company that has till now been working on client projects. we employed little to no project management and that has cost us a lot. we've used only the barest of tools (wireframing, prototyping etc) but no formal project management process has been put into place. we've learnt from our mistakes and want to prevent them from happening in the future. also, we are looking to develop our own products and we understand that putting in a proper project management paradigm will help. after a lot of research, we've sort of settled on agile for a few reasons: agile seems to scale well with team size. our team is small right now and we hope to grow and agile seems to be a process that we can put in place now and grow with. agile will help us with customers who just can't seem to make up their minds and keep changing requirements. we'd appreciate the community's thoughts on this. is this a correct way to think? will agile be a good system to put into place, where there has been none till now? are there any resources that may help us in our position? pretty much all of the resources that we've found start by comparing agile to x (where x = any management methodology) and why its better than x and how agile can be implemented in place of x. we're looking for resources that can help us out in our particular situation. thanks for all your help!

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• Salaries in reverse engineering fields [closed]

  - by John

  I bumped into an old friend at a conference and he told me he was now a consultant doing reverse engineering. I don't have much knowledge of this particular area, but this person (that I can't manage to get in touch with now) just casually mentioned that he was earning big bucks. I was hoping someone at SO may know of the salary range that a skilled and experienced employee/freelancer may earn in this area? I can't find much information on the web - small area maybe? I dunno. Any help would be appreciated.

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• Which programming language should I learn? [on hold]

  - by Ashkan

  I'm Ashkan and I'm from Iran, I started programming when I was 13 and I learned a lot of stuff since then, But now I'm totally lost. Since I live in Iran there are no counselor or any professionals out there to help me, so I decided to ask here. I started with Visual Basic and after 1 year I started to learn HTML , CSS , Javascript and JQuery. And for the past 6 months I've been learning PHP,and I have a basic understanding of OOP. I want to move to America to continue my studies and I was wondering which programming language helps me the most to get there? Should I learn C++ or JAVA or should I study Computer Science and Math? also since We are not in a good place financially, I want a programming language that helps me in college and lets me make some money? Thanks in advance and sorry for my poor English skills.

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• When should we use weak entities when modelling a database?

  - by Songo

  This is basically a question about what are weak entities? When should we use them? How should they be modeled? What is the main difference between normal entities and weak entities? Does weak entities correspond to value objects when doing Domain Driven Design? To help keep the question on topic here is an example taken from Wikipedia that people can use to answer these question: In this example OrderItem was modeled as a weak entity, but I can't understand why it can't be modeled as a normal entity. Another question is what if I want to track the order history (i.e. the changes in it status) would that be a normal or weak entity?

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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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• What do you think of this iterator syntax?

  - by ChaosPandion

  I've been working on an ECMAScript dialect for quite some time now and have reached a point where I am comfortable adding new language features. I would love to hear some thoughts and suggestions on the syntax. Example iterator Numbers { yield 1; yield 2; yield 3; if (true) { yield break; } yield continue iterator { yield 4; yield 5; yield 6; }; } Syntax IteratorDeclaration:     iterator  Identifier  {  IteratorBody  } IteratorExpression:     iterator  Identifieropt  {  IteratorBody  } IteratorBody:     IteratorStatementsopt IteratorStatements:     IteratorStatement IteratorStatementsopt IteratorStatement:     Statement but not one of BreakStatement ContinueStatement ReturnStatement     YieldStatement     YieldBreakStatement     YieldContinueStatement YieldStatement:     yield  Expression  ; YieldBreakStatement:     yield  break  ; YieldContinueStatement:     yield  continue  Expression  ;

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• Interviewing a DBA

  - by kev

  Our Company is in the Process of recuiting a DBA. I have built a group test of questions from basic questions such as Pk and Fk constraints, simple querries(fizzbuzz style) to more advanced things such as indexes, Collation, isolation levels and how to trace deadlocks. However, that is the limit of my knowledge. So my question to all the DBA's is what is the base level knowledge that all DBA's should have? We are really looking for someone that will be able to manage our replication, analyzing some of our slower running queries(that the devs can go to for help) and someone that can trace some of the deadlock issues that we are having. Any help would be most appreciated!

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• need explanation on amortization in algorithm

  - by Pradeep

  I am a learning algorithm analysis and came across a analysis tool for understanding the running time of an algorithm with widely varying performance which is called as amortization. The autor quotes " An array with upper bound of n elements, with a fixed bound N, on it size. Operation clear takes O(n) time, since we should dereference all the elements in the array in order to really empty it. " The above statement is clear and valid. Now consider the next content: "Now consider a series of n operations on an initially empty array. if we take the worst case viewpoint, the running time is O(n^2), since the worst case of a sigle clear operation in the series is O(n) and there may be as many as O(n) clear operations in the series." From the above statement how is the time complexity O(n^2)? I did not understand the logic behind it. if 'n' operations are performed how is it O(n ^2)? Please explain what the autor is trying to convey..

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• C/C++: Who uses the logical operator macros from iso646.h and why?

  - by Jaime Soto

  There has been some debate at work about using the merits of using the alternative spellings for C/C++ logical operators in iso646.h: and && and_eq &= bitand & bitor | compl ~ not ! not_eq != or || or_eq |= xor ^ xor_eq ^= According to Wikipedia, these macros facilitate typing logical operators in international (non-US English?) and non-QWERTY keyboards. All of our development team is in the same office in Orlando, FL, USA and from what I have seen we all use the US English QWERTY keyboard layout; even Dvorak provides all the necessary characters. Supporters of using the iso646.h macros claim we should them because they are part of the C and C++ standards. I think this argument is moot since digraphs and trigraphs are also part of these standards and they are not even supported by default in many compilers. My rationale for opposing these macros in our team is that we do not need them since: Everybody on our team uses the US English QWERTY keyboard layout; C and C++ programming books from the US barely mention iso646.h, if at all; and new developers may not be familiar with iso646.h (this is expected if they are from the US). /rant Finally, to my set of questions: Does anyone in this site use the iso646.h logical operator macros? Why? What is your opinion about using the iso646.h logical operator macros in code written and maintained on US English QWERTY keyboards? Is my digraph and trigraph analogy a valid argument against using iso646.h with US English QWERTY keyboard layouts? EDIT: I missed two similar questions in StackOverflow: Is anybody using the named boolean operators? Which C++ logical operators do you use: and, or, not and the ilk or C style operators? why?

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• Which programming language for text editing?

  - by Ali

  I need a programming language for text editing and processing (replace, formatting, regex, string comparison, word processing, text analysis, etc). Which programming language is more powerful and has more functions for this purpose? Since I work PHP for my web projects, I currently use PHP; but the fact is that PHP is a scripting language for web applications, my current project is offline. I am curious if other programming languages such as Perl, Python, C, C++, Java, etc have more functionality for this purpose, and worth of shifting the project?

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• Requirements/issue tracker similar to online spreadsheet

  - by Maxim Eliseev

  Is there a requirements/issue tracker software which is similar to Google spreadsheet? We have Fogbugz but I find it more heavyweight and slow than a simple spreadsheet. Is there a Fogbugz alternative which is - fast - can show issues/requirements as a spreadsheet (at) and allows in-place editing - supports tree structures (where issue can have child issues)? It is required for a small project. There will be 2 developers and 1-2 other users. I guess that only one user will be actively maintaining it. UPDATE I do not say that a spreadsheet is better than Fogbugz or similar tools. In fact I am looking for a tool which is similar to Fogbugz and could replace a spreadsheet, but faster than Fogbugz and has an additional feature (table-like mode). I'd like to find a tool which can operate in a mode which looks like a table (one row per issue) but has a rich set features (similar to Fogbugs and JIRA). I find Fogbugz (and similar tools) inconvenient because I must enter the web form in order to edit anything. In-place editing (when issues are shown as a table) would be much faster.

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• What's the best practice for async APIs that return futures on Scala?

  - by Maurício Linhares

  I have started a project to write an async PostgreSQL driver on Scala and to be async, I need to accept callbacks and use futures, but then accepting a callback and a future makes the code cumbersome because you always have to send a callback even if it is useless. Here's a test: "insert a row in the database" in { withHandler { (handler, future) => future.get(5, TimeUnit.SECONDS) handler.sendQuery( this.create ){ query => }.get( 5, TimeUnit.SECONDS ) handler.sendQuery( this.insert ){ query => }.get( 5, TimeUnit.SECONDS ).rowsAffected === 1 } } Sending the empty callback is horrible but I couldn't find a way to make it optional or anything like that, so right now I don't have a lot of ideas on how this external API should look like. It could be something like: handler.sendQuery( this.create ).addListener { query => println(query) } But then again, I'm not sure how people are organizing API's in this regard. Providing examples in other projects would also be great.

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• Why should i write a commit message?

  - by acidzombie24

  Why should i write a commit message? I dont want to and i think its stupid every single time. A gui frontend i use which will go unnamed forces you to do it. I hear other doing it everytime even if they are using the VCS on the command line. If i commit several times a day and havent finish a feature what am i writing about? I ONLY ever write a message after many comments and i feel its time for a mini tag or when i do an actual tag. Am i right or am i missing something? also i am using a distributed system

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• complex access control system

  - by Atul Gupta

  I want to build a complex access control system just like Facebook. How should I design my database so that: A user may select which streams to see (via liking a page) and may further select to see all or only important streams. Also he get to see posts of a friend, but if a friend changes visibility he may or may not see it. A user may be an owner or member of a group and accordingly he have access. So for a user there is so many access related information and also for each data point. I use Perl/MySQL/Apache. Any help will be appreciated.

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• Licensing Options for a dead project

  - by Russell Durham

  I'm currently working on a project where the original author informally told me that he didn't want to publish the source. Since then, the original author has gone leaving me to be the sole developer on the project. I've tried to contact him several times about making the project open source so that I can have other developers assist me but he is not responding to any communications. I'm not planning on trying to make money of the software, I just want a general license that allows me to put the code on GitHub or BitBucket so that other people in the community can assist me with the development. Can I do this since he is gone and not responding to any form of communication? Is there a time period I need to wait? I know what I asking for is legal advice, I just have no idea where to start looking to find the answer so I decided to start here.

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• Theoretically bug-free programs

  - by user2443423

  I have read lot of articles which state that code can't be bug-free, and they are talking about these theorems: Halting problem Gödel's incompleteness theorem Rice's theorem Actually Rice's theorem looks like an implication of the halting problem and the halting problem is in close relationship with Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Does this imply that every program will have at least one unintended behavior? Or does it mean that it's not possible to write code to verify it? What about recursive checking? Let's assume that I have two programs. Both of them have bugs, but they don't share the same bug. What will happen if I run them concurrently? And of course most of discussions talked about Turing machines. What about linear-bounded automation (real computers)?

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• Terminology: .NET C++ vs. traditional C++

  - by Mike Clark

  Hello. I've recently been working with a team that's using both .NET C++ and pre-.NET C++. I fully understand the technical differences between the two technologies. However, I sometimes feel like I'm floundering when it comes to the terminology used to differentiate the two. Example: Say we have two projects: ProjectA contains "C++" code that builds a .NET assembly DLL. ProjectB contains Visual C++ code that builds a traditional native Windows DLL. What is the best way to succinctly and terminologically draw a distinction between the two projects? Again, I'm not asking for an in-depth technical description of the differences between the two technologies. I'm just looking for names and labels. This is how I might try to make the distinction when talking to someone about Project A and Project B: "ProjectA is a managed .NET C++ project" and ProjectB is an unmanaged Visual C++ DLL project." However I am not at all certain that this terminology is ideal, or even correct. Please describe what you feel the ideal language to use in this situation (or similar situations) might be. Feel free to motivate your answer.

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• Releasing an open source project without getting embarrassed

  - by Hopeful

  I've been working by myself on a fairly large open source project for quite a while and it's nearing the point where I'd like to release it. However, I'm self-taught and I don't really know anyone who could adequately review my project. A few years ago, I had released a small bit of code which pretty much got ripped apart (in a critical sense) on the forum where I released it. Even though the code worked, the criticism was accurate but brutal. It prompted me to begin searching for best practices for everything and in the end I feel that it made me a much better developer. I've gone over everything in my project so many times trying to make it perfect that I've lost count. I believe in my project and think it has the potential to help a lot of people and I feel like I've done some cool things in interesting ways with it. Still, because I'm self-taught, I can't help but wonder what gaps exist in my self-education. The way my code was ripped apart last time isn't something I'd like to repeat. I think my two biggest fears with releasing my project that I've poured countless hours into are being absolutely embarrassed because I missed some patently obvious things because of my self-education or, worse, releasing it to the sound of crickets. Is there anyone who has been in a similar situation? I'm not afraid of constructive criticism, so long as it is constructive and not just a rant on how I screwed up. I know there is a code review site on StackExchange, but it's not really set up for large projects and I didn't feel like the community there is large enough yet to get good feedback if I were to post parts of my project piecemeal (I tried with one file). What can I do to give my project at least some measure of success without getting embarrassed or devestated in the process?

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• Programming and Ubiquitous Language (DDD) in a non-English domain

  - by Sandor Drieënhuizen

  I know there are some questions already here that are closely related to this subject but none of them take Ubiquitous Language as the starting point so I think that justifies this question. For those who don't know: Ubiquitous Language is the concept of defining a (both spoken and written) language that is equally used across developers and domain experts to avoid inconsistencies and miscommunication due to translation problems and misunderstanding. You will see the same terminology show up in code, conversations between any team member, functional specs and whatnot. So, what I was wondering about is how to deal with Ubiquitous Language in non-English domains. Personally, I strongly favor writing programming code in English completely, including comments but ofcourse excluding constants and resources. However, in a non-English domain, I'm forced to make a decision either to: Write code reflecting the Ubiquitous Language in the natural language of the domain. Translate the Ubiquitous Language to English and stop communicating in the natural language of the domain. Define a table that defines how the Ubiquitous Language translates to English. Here are some of my thoughts based on these options: 1) I have a strong aversion against mixed-language code, that is coding using type/member/variable names etc. that are non-English. Most programming languages 'breathe' English to a large extent and most of the technical literature, design pattern names etc. are in English as well. Therefore, in most cases there's just no way of writing code entirely in a non-English language so you end up with mixed languages anyway. 2) This will force the domain experts to start thinking and talking in the English equivalent of the UL, something that will probably not come naturally to them and therefore hinders communication significantly. 3) In this case, the developers communicate with the domain experts in their native language while the developers communicate with each other in English and most importantly, they write code using the English translation of the UL. I'm sure I don't want to go for the first option and I think option 3 is much better than option 2. What do you think? Am I missing other options? UPDATE Today, about year later, having dealt with this issue on a daily basis, I have to say that option 3 has worked out pretty well for me. It wasn't as tedious as I initially feared and translating in real time while talking to the client wasn't a problem either. I also found the following advantages to be true, based on my experience. Translating the UL makes you pay more attention to defining the UL and even the domain itself, especially when you don't know how to translate a term and you have to start looking through dictionaries etc. This has even caused me to reconsider domain modeling decisions a few times. It helps you make your knowledge of the English language more profound. Obviously, your code is much more pleasant to look at instead of being a mind boggling obscenity.

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