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• Balancing game difficulty against player progression

  - by Raven Dreamer

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

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• Handling packet impersonating in client-server model online game

  - by TheDespite

  I am designing a server-client model game library/engine. How do I, and should I even bother to handle frequent update packet possible impersonating? In my current design anyone could copy a packet from someone else and modify it to execute any non-critical action for another client. I am currently compressing all datagrams so that adds just a tad of security. Edit: One way I thought about was to send a unique "key" to the verified client every x_time and then the client has to add that to all of it's update packets until a new key is sent. Edit2: I should have mentioned that I am not concerned about whether the actions described in the packet are available to the client at the time, this is all checked by the server which I thought was obvious. I am only concerned about someone sending packets for another client.

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• rc.local is not always executed upon boot

  - by starcorn

  Hey, I have some weird problem with the rc.local file which is located in /etc/rc.local the thing is that it is not always running when I boot up the laptop. Maybe every second time, I haven't counted. Anyway when that happens I have to manually go to terminal and type sudo /etc/init.d/rc.local start, which kinda kills the purpose of having this script. Anyone know what the problem could be? EDIT Since this wasn't obvious. This is an issue where I make a fresh boot up. Which mean I have shut down the computer. And next time when I boot up the computer, the rc.local file is randomly deciding whether it will automatically start or not. Here's a copy of what my rc.local file contains echo -n 255 > /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2/sensitivity echo level 2 > /proc/acpi/ibm/fan touch /home/starcorn/Desktop/foo rfkill block bluetooth exit 0

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• What should my "code sample" look like?

  - by thesunneversets

  I've just had quite a good phone interview (for a CakePHP-related position, not that it's especially important to the question). The interviewer seemed to be impressed with my resume and personality. At the end, though, he asked me to email him a code sample from my existing work project, "to check you're not secretly a terrible programmer, ha ha!" I'm not too worried that my code can't stand on its own two feet, but I'm very much an intermediate programmer rather than an expert. What obvious pitfalls should I make sure my code sample doesn't fall into, in case they rule me out on the spot? Secondly, and this is probably the harder part of the question to answer, what features in a code sample would be so impressive that they would instantly make you much more favourably inclined towards the programmer? All ideas or suggestions welcomed!

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• Should I ditch AJAX in client side web development when I've got a web-socket open?

  - by jt0dd

  I was thinking that maybe I should forget AJAX (HTTP) requests when I've got a web-socket open between client and server, but I decided I should ask here to check if this could be a bad practice for some reason that I'm not thinking of. Once the socket is open, there's less syntax (often meaning simpler error handling) involved in passing information between client and server with Socket.io (just one example of a web-socket). Is there some obvious situation where a web-socket (Socket.io for example) isn't going to be capable of handling a functionality that an AJAX request could do easily?

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• Trouble launch byobu with custom windows.NAME file

  - by Brendan Piater

  Apologies if the solution is obvious but I'm stumped! I want to launch byobu from within my Gnome 3 desktop environment on 12.04 but it's not working for me as yet. Here's what I have: created a windows list file ~/.byobu/windows.mrb then tried to launch byobu from within the gnome terminal with: $ BYOBU_WINDOWS=mrb byobu But it gives me the default windows list, NOT my windows list. I followed these instructions from the wiki: http://goo.gl/omgl8 Here is a sanitised version of my windows.mrb file: screen -t local bash screen -t name1 ssh xxx@xxx screen -t name2 ssh root@xxx screen -t name3 bash Appreciate the time and effort. Cheers Brendan

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• Self-Service Testing Cloud Enables Improved Efficiency and Productivity for Development and Quality Assurance Organizations

  - by Sandra Cheevers

  With organizations spending as much as 50 percent of their QA time with non-test related activities like setting up hardware and deploying applications and test tools, the cloud will bring obvious benefits. Oracle announced today self-service testing capabilities to enable you to deploy private or public testing clouds. These capabilities help software development and QA organizations deliver higher quality applications, while enhancing testing efficiency and reducing duration of testing projects. This kind of cloud based self-service testing provides better efficiency and agility. The Testing-as-a-Service solution offers test lab management, automatic deployment of complex multi-tier applications, rich application performance monitoring, test data management and chargeback, all in a unified workflow. For more details, read the press release Oracle Announces Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Testing-as-a-Service Solution here.

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• Simplest way to use Steam Leaderboards from C# [on hold]

  - by Miau

  We are about to integrate steamworks for leaderboards and achievements into our game. I see there are many open and closed source libraries that can be used to use SteamWorks from C#. Rolling our own wrapper can be done, but if the other libraries are reliable then it would be better to use and perhaps contribute back if we see any obvious gaps. Have you used any and if so what was your experience with the different libraries? Specifically for Leaderboards and achievements The ones I found are: SteamWorks.net Steam4Net Ludosity (can be used outside of Unity apparently)

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• Triangle Strips and Tangent Space Normal Mapping

  - by Koarl

  Short: Do triangle strips and Tangent Space Normal mapping go together? According to quite a lot of tutorials on bump mapping, it seems common practice to derive tangent space matrices in a vertex program and transform the light direction vector(s) to tangent space and then pass them on to a fragment program. However, if one was using triangle strips or index buffers, it is a given that the vertex buffer contains vertices that sit at border edges and would thus require more than one normal to derive tangent space matrices to interpolate between in fragment programs. Is there any reasonable way to not have duplicate vertices in your buffer and still use tangent space normal mapping? Which one do you think is better: Having normal and tangent encoded in the assets and just optimize the geometry handling to alleviate the cost of duplicate vertices or using triangle strips and computing normals/tangents completely at run time? Thinking about it, the more reasonable answer seems to be the first one, but why might my professor still be fussing about triangle strips when it seems so obvious?

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• PostgreSQL data diff

  - by skanatek

  Note: this question is not about syncing database schema/structure Problem In my web application I have a PostgreSQL database server (PGS) and a (separate machine) business logic server (BLS) which regularly (every minute or two) queries 'SELECT ALL' against PGS. The problem is that the 'SELECT ALL' query can easily return 50-200 MB each time. It is obvious that it would be not so good architecture-wise to transfer so much data so frequently over the web. Possible solution What I would like to do is to run some diff tool on PGS and compare the new query with the previous query (all this should be done on PGS). Once the comparison is done I would like to get a dump from PGS and transfer it to BLS. I expect that a diff-based dump would be much, much smaller than the whole 'SELECT ALL' query. Question Is there any data diff tool for PostgreSQL that can do diffs that compare PostgreSQL data between 2 tables or 2 dumps? Note: I would prefer some open-source software tool.

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• Why doesn't LightDM always doesn't start under XEN

  - by DaedalusFall

  When I use XEN on Ubuntu (12.10), I have a problem that lightdm sometimes doesn't start when I boot up, I have to log in on the TTY and use sudo service lightdm restart, sometimes several times. Some of the time I get a mouse cursor and a blinking underscore in the top left of the (otherwise black) screen, but after restarting lightdm a few times it eventually comes up properly. I've tried this with XEN from the repos (version 4.1), XEN 4.2 built from source, an NVIDIA card and a radeon card (not using fglrx, which I can't seem to make work under XEN), the results are more or less the same. I can't see anything obvious in my Xorg.log, but I'm not really sure what to look for. Anyone had similar problems or luck getting xen working? Thanks in advance.

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• Has anyone used RemObjects' Hydra to mix a large Delphi project with new C# additions?

  - by robsoft

  (Hopefully this is deemed suitable for Programmers, not StackOverflow - I could imagine it getting closed at SO because there's no obvious 'right' answer.) We have a large Delphi 2007 VCL project that uses things like DBXpress, Report Builder, DevExpress and TMS components (both visual and non-visual) etc. For reasons I won't bore you with, the company would like to start adding new modules to the program using .Net (via C# in particular). Rewriting from scratch isn't an option and given the heavy use of Report Builder and various other bits of Delphi-specific 3rd party code, I suspect that using something like TurnSharp to regenerate a C# project wouldn't work well either. Ideally we want to keep our Win32 VCL Delphi code but add new modules (plug-ins, sections of contained functionality like wizards etc) via C#. So we're considering RemObjects' Hydra, and in the next few weeks will probably have a go at evaluating it on a smaller-but-representative project first. I wondered if anyone had experience of doing this kind of thing with Hydra...?

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• How can programming ability be used to help people in poverty?

  - by Matthew

  As a student studying Computer Science in college, I often hear from friends working on various humanitarian projects, and I want to do something myself. But it seems that programmers don't have as many obvious avenues to help out as, say, doctors or teachers. What are some ways in which programmers can put their talent to use for people in poverty. Disclaimer: I am not saying that programmers have some obligation to do this, merely that I want to. I apologize if this question is too subjective for this site--I am marking it community wiki just in case (edit: I can't figure out how to mark this as community wiki. Can someone help me out?).

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• Code Smell: Inheritance Abuse

  - by dsimcha

  It's been generally accepted in the OO community that one should "favor composition over inheritance". On the other hand, inheritance does provide both polymorphism and a straightforward, terse way of delegating everything to a base class unless explicitly overridden and is therefore extremely convenient and useful. Delegation can often (though not always) be verbose and brittle. The most obvious and IMHO surest sign of inheritance abuse is violation of the Liskov Substitution Principle. What are some other signs that inheritance is The Wrong Tool for the Job even if it seems convenient?

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• Silverlight Cream Monday WP7 App Review # 2

  - by Dave Campbell

  Today's Review (alphabetic order): GooNews, Grocery Shopping List, Need for Speed, SurfCube, and United Nations News. I'm a day late if these are going to be 'Monday' posts, but there are lots of apps, lots of goodness, and lots of email, so I might try to do 2 a week, we'll see. So once again I've got a small review of 5 apps that are either on my phone or have been. Disclaimers at the end. In this Issue:   GooNews is a very cool app from Shawn Wildermuth (AgiliTrain). I don't know if he uses this as a demo during his instruction, but it definitely serves a purpose... wanna pick up the top news items from Google on a never-ending basis? ... this is it. You can add your own keyword searches, and send stories to InstaPaper or share via email. I like this because it brings me the news quickly and updated, and works great. GooNews is by AgiliTrain and is Free This was a request by the author, and actually surprised me. I'm a big one for lists, but I would have just done a OneNote list to SkyDrive and to my phone. This app is a lot more than that, but will take you some setup to make it be 'yours'. For obvious reasons, there are no unit prices on things, so you have to set that up to get some idea of the cost of what you're shopping for. But if you do that, you'll get a nice total. Lots of thought went into the various categories and you can add your own. There's a bit of animation on the category selection that's nice. He seems to have covered all the bases necessary to use this, even shopping 'plans' that can be saved, and emailing of lists. As I said, I'm more of a raw list person, but if you take the time to set this up, it should work very nicely for you. Grocery Shopping List is by Grocery Shopper and is $0.99 ($1.99 after Feb 1) with a free trial. This was my 2nd commercial game I bought, and the one I've played the most. I ran the trial, thought it worked great, and bought it. I've had a lot of fun with this... there's no gas pedal.. your foot is in the carbeurator from the GO!, and unless you wanna tap the screen and brake like a little girl, just hang onto the steering wheel (the phone), and guide your way through. Hours of fun and challenges here. I like this because it's got some challenge to it, and the cars seem to be very realistic in their reactions. Need for Speed Undercover is by Electronic Arts is $4.99 and has a free trial. SurfCube Browser is another app by the folks that did the GuitarTuner I reviewed on Monday. You have to see SurfCube to believe it. You've probably seen the YouTube video, if not check SilverlightCream number 1017. The app works very solid, and just as the video demonstrates. I downloaded and tried this, and it immediately did 2 things: bought it, and pinned it to my start page. I like this because it's fun to work with, and it works great as a browser. I'm about *this* close to replacing the IE tile on my front page with SurfCube. SurfCube Browser is by Kinabalu Innovation Limited and is $1.99 and has a free trial. Coming in with another News app is United Nations News by Justin Angel. This is definitely a news aggregator for 'grown ups'... news, photos, videos, and radio broadcsts from the international community all in one very slick app. This is an amazingly well thought-out and complete app. Even better yet, Justin has the code on CodePlex. A very well-done International news aggregator. United Nations News is by Justin Angel and is Free. A few disclaimers: Feel free to write me about your app and tell me about it. While it would be very cool to receive a whole bunch of xap files to review, at this point, for technical reasons, I'm unable to side-load my device. Since I plan on only doing this one day a week (twice if I find time), and only 5, I may never get caught up, so if you send me some info, be patient. Re: games ... remember I'm old... I'm from the era of Colossal Cave and Zork. Duke-Nukem 2D and Captain Comic were awesome. I don't own an XBOX or any other game system, so take game reviews from my perspective -- who knows, it may be refreshing :) I won't pay for an app or game just to try it. If you expect me to test-drive your app, it's going to have to have a Free Trial. I'm still playing with the format, comments are welcome. I decided I should alphabetize the list today... so there's no order implied Let me know what you think of the idea of doing reviews, or the layout/whatever, and Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Realistic planetary terrain generation with weights

  - by Programmdude

  I need terrain generation for a planet. The planet will be divided up into several hundred hexes, and I need it to be realistic and based on weights. I have dabbled in terrain generation before, but nothing like this. So I figure it would be a good idea to ask the community for answers, recommended articles or the like. By realistic, I mean not just random hexes, but continent shaped things with a few islands. More desert around the equator and more ice around the poles. I also have two weights I need to base it around: ice percentage and water percentage. That means that around XX% of the planet will need to be water. Does anyone have any advice or places to start? Generating arbitrary terrain is easy, but something a bit more "organic" like this seems rather difficult. It also needs to be seamless. Should be obvious since it's a planet, but no harm in pointing it out.

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• How to implement a safe password history

  - by Lorenzo

  Passwords shouldn't be stored in plain text for obvious security reasons: you have to store hashes, and you should also generate the hash carefully to avoid rainbow table attacks. However, usually you have the requirement to store the last n passwords and to enforce minimal complexity and minimal change between the different passwords (to prevent the user from using a sequence like Password_1, Password_2, ..., Password_n). This would be trivial with plain text passwords, but how can you do that by storing only hashes? In other words: how it is possible to implement a safe password history mechanism?

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• Naming a predicate: "precondition" or "precondition_is_met"?

  - by RexE

  In my web app framework, each page can have a precondition that needs to be satisfied before it can be displayed to the user. For example, if user 1 and user 2 are playing a back-and-forth role-playing game, user 2 needs to wait for user 1 to finish his turn before he can take his turn. Otherwise, the user is displayed a waiting page. This is implemented with a predicate: def precondition(self): return user_1.completed_turn The simplest name for this API is precondition, but this leads to code like if precondition(): ..., which is not really obvious. Seems to me like it is more accurate to call it precondition_is_met(), but not sure about that either. Is there a best practice for naming methods like this?

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• What to do with database in dev/production phases of a website?

  - by TheLQ

  For a while now I've been keeping a website I'm developing in the standard dev/production phases. Its been pretty simple: Mercurial repo for dev, repo for production. Do work in dev, get approved, push to production. But now I'm trying to apply this process to a new website that has a database and am struggling on how to figure out a development strategy. What I didn't mention above is that I do all my work on my own repo, push it to dev, then later push it to production, so its 3 different servers. So how do I manage my database? The obvious solution of mysqldump every commit isn't going to happen, and a dump at the end of the day isn't all that helpful when you want to undo later one change that happened in the middle of the day. What is the best way to accomplish this?

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• TileMapRenderer in libGDX not drawing anything

  - by Benjamin Dengler

  So I followed the tutorial on the libGDX wiki to draw Tiled maps but it doesn't seem to render anything. Here's how I setup my OrthographicCamera and load the map: camera = new OrthographicCamera(Gdx.graphics.getWidth(), Gdx.graphics.getHeight()); map = TiledLoader.createMap(Gdx.files.internal("maps/test.tmx")); atlas = new TileAtlas(map, Gdx.files.internal("maps")); tileMapRenderer = new TileMapRenderer(map, atlas, 8, 8); And here is my render function: Gdx.gl.glClearColor(0, 0, 0, 1); Gdx.gl.glClear(GL10.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); camera.update(); tileMapRenderer.render(camera); Also I did pack the tile map using the TiledMapPacker. I'm completely stumped... am I missing anything obvious here? EDIT: While debugging I noticed that the TileAtlas seems to be empty, which I guess shouldn't be the case, but I have no idea why it's empty.

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• How to Move Your Google Authenticator Credentials to a New Android Phone or Tablet

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Most of the app data on your Android is probably synced online will automatically sync to a new phone or tablet. However, your Google Authenticator credentials won’t — they aren’t synchronized for obvious security reasons. If you’re doing a factory reset, getting a new phone, or just want to copy your credentials to second device, these steps will help you move your authenticator data over so you won’t lose your access codes. How to Factory Reset Your Android Phone or Tablet When It Won’t Boot Our Geek Trivia App for Windows 8 is Now Available Everywhere How To Boot Your Android Phone or Tablet Into Safe Mode

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• How to fix hibernate / suspend with proprietary nVidia driver?

  - by Chris

  Hi, I've just got an Dell Precision M6500 that comes with an nVidia card. Together with Kubunutu 10.10 and the proprietary nvidia driver suspend to disk or RAM does not work. It's allways ending with a running system and a locked screen (i.e. I can just enter my password and everything is as before - it's never sleeping) Can someone please help me to debug this issue? Where should I look for information? None of the log files seem to show an obvious error... Thanks, Chris

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• The right way to find a SPUser in SharePoint 2013

  - by Sahil Malik

  SharePoint, WCF and Azure Trainings: more information Obvious stuff out of the way, SharePoint 2013 is claims and claims only. If you’re still pimping classic windows identities, you’re a fool. But this creates an interesting wrinkle. How the hell is one supposed to find a SPUser? This, especially given that a user id now looks like this - i:0#.w|ws\administrator .. all of those have a meaning .. i stands for identity 0 is the zero’th registered claims provider w before the pipe is windows and after pipe is the final username. What if I had a hotmail account called ws\administrator? You see, browsing through web.SiteUsers, is no longer enough. Not only is it error prone, it won’t work for any other identity type besides Windows. So what is a poor SharePoint developer to do? Easy. Use the cod below instead, Read full article ....

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• Modularity through HTTP

  - by Michael Williamson

  As programmers, we strive for modularity in the code we write. We hope that splitting the problem up makes it easier to solve, and allows us to reuse parts of our code in other applications. Object-orientation is the most obvious of many attempts to get us closer to this ideal, and yet one of the most successful approaches is almost accidental: the web. Programming languages provide us with functions and classes, and plenty of other ways to modularize our code. This allows us to take our large problem, split it into small parts, and solve those small parts without having to worry about the whole. It also makes it easier to reason about our code. So far, so good, but now that we’ve written our small, independent module, for example to send out e-mails to my customers, we’d like to reuse it in another application. By creating DLLs, JARs or our platform’s package container of choice, we can do just that – provided our new application is on the same platform. Want to use a Java library from C#? Well, good luck – it might be possible, but it’s not going to be smooth sailing. Even if a library exists, it doesn’t mean that using it going to be a pleasant experience. Say I want to use Java to write out an XML document to an output stream. You’d imagine this would be a simple one-liner. You’d be wrong: import org.w3c.dom.*; import java.io.*; import javax.xml.transform.*; import javax.xml.transform.dom.*; import javax.xml.transform.stream.*; private static final void writeDoc(Document doc, OutputStream out) throws IOException { try { Transformer t = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer(); t.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.DOCTYPE_SYSTEM, doc.getDoctype().getSystemId()); t.transform(new DOMSource(doc), new StreamResult(out)); } catch (TransformerException e) { throw new AssertionError(e); // Can't happen! } } Most of the time, there is a good chance somebody else has written the code before, but if nobody can understand the interface to that code, nobody’s going to use it. The result is that most of the code we write is just a variation on a theme. Despite our best efforts, we’ve fallen a little short of our ideal, but the web brings us closer. If we want to send e-mails to our customers, we could write an e-mail-sending library. More likely, we’d use an existing one for our language. Even then, we probably wouldn’t have niceties like A/B testing or DKIM signing. Alternatively, we could just fire some HTTP requests at MailChimp, and get a whole slew of features without getting anywhere near the code that implements them. The web is inherently language agnostic. So long as your language can send and receive text over HTTP, and probably parse some JSON, you’re about as well equipped as anybody. Instead of building libraries for a specific language, we can build a service that almost every language can reuse. The text-based nature of HTTP also helps to limit the complexity of the API. As SOAP will attest, you can still make a horrible mess using HTTP, but at least it is an obvious horrible mess. Complex data structures are tedious to marshal to and from text, providing a strong incentive to keep things simple. By contrast, spotting the complexities in a class hierarchy is often not as easy. HTTP doesn’t solve every problem. It probably isn’t such a good idea to use it inside an inner loop that’s executed thousands of times per second. What’s more, the HTTP approach might introduce some new problems. We often need to add a thin shim to each application that we wish to communicate over HTTP. For instance, we might need to write a small plugin in PHP if we want to integrate WordPress into our system. Suddenly, instead of a system written in one language, we’re maintaining a system with several distinct languages and platforms. Even then, we should strive to avoid re-implementing the same old thing. As programmers, we consistently underestimate both the cost of building a system and the ongoing maintenance. If we allow ourselves to integrate existing applications, even if they’re in unfamiliar languages, we save ourselves those development and maintenance costs, as well as being able to pick the best solution for our problem. Thanks to the web, HTTP is often the easiest way to get there.

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• What are the preferred documentation tools for the major programming languages?

  - by Dave Peck

  I'm interested in compiling a list of major programming languages and their preferred documentation toolsets. To scope this a bit: The exact structure of the answer may vary from language to language, but there appear to be two aspects common to all languages: (1) in-code syntax for documentation, and (2) documentation generators that make use of said syntax. There are also cases where generators are used independent of code. For example, tutorial-style documentation is common in the Python world and is often disconnected from underlying code. Many languages have multiple commonly-used documentation strategies and tool chains, and I'd love to capture this. Finally, there are cross-language tools like Doxygen that also have some traction and would be worth noting here. Here are some obvious target languages to start with: Python, Ruby, Java, C#, PHP, Objective-C, C/C++, Haskell, Erlang, Scala, Clojure If this question catches on, I'll try and keep this section updated with the most recent list. Thanks!

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