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• Moving from ClearCase to Mercurial: your top tips?

  - by Robusto

  We will soon start replacing ClearCase with Mercurial. I hear this is a good thing. The change model vs. the version model. Wave of the future. I'm prepared to believe this. Still, it kind of frightens me. Hey, it took Joel Spolsky a while to grok the difference and how to get maximum advantage out of Mercurial, so I'm betting I will run into conceptual traps and pitfalls. Does anyone have any real-world "how to grok Mercurial" tips? Anything specific suggestions that will help me bridge the conceptual gap. Any warnings about things not to do? I'd appreciate hearing them. I've already read the closest questions on SO related to this topic, as well as the Mercurial tour and a number of other blogs. I'm mainly interested in any gotchas or uh-ohs I may encounter. Any wisdom you can impart will be appreciated.

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• Can aptitude for learning Programming paradigms be influenced by culture or native language's gramma

  - by DVK

  It is well known that different people have different aptitudes regarding various programming paradigms (e.g. some people have trouble learning non-procedural, especially functional languages. Some people have trouble understanding pointers - see Joel Spolsky's blog for musings on that. Some people have trouble grasping recursion). I was recently reading about a study that looked at how the grammar of someone's native language affected their speed of learning math. Can't find that article now but a quick googling found this reference. That led me to wondering whether someone's native culture or first language might affect their aptitude towards various programming paradigms. I'm more curious about positive influences - e.g. some trait that make it easier/faster for someone to learn a particular paradigm, for example native language grammar being very recursion-oriented. To be clear, I'm looking for how culture/language grammare may affect the difference between aptitude of the same person towards various paradigms as opposed to how it affects overall aptitude towards programming between different persons. Important: the only answers I'm interested in are either references to scientific studies, or personal observations from someone intimately familiar with a particular culture/language, including from their own experience. E.g. I'm not interested in your opinion of how Chinese being your first language affects anything unless you speak Chinese or worked with extremely large set of Chinese-native programmers extensively. I'm OK with your guesstimates not based on scientific studies, but please be sure to supply your reasoning about plausible causes of your observation. I'm not interested in culture-bashing (any such commends will be deleted or flagged for deletion). I'm also not particularly interested in culture-building - we all know Linus is from Finland and Tetris was written in Russia and Larry Wall is an American. Any culture/nation can produce a brilliant mind in any discipline. I'm interested in averages.

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• Advice for last year college graduates

  - by Tomh

  Hey guys, I know there are many "advice" questions around this site. But I wanted to to narrow mine down to last year college students, in my case my last year as Master student in computer science. So far is a list of things I've done during my time in college (which I can recommend others to do aswell): Code a lot I've written several hobby projects, had part time jobs, entered the Imagine cup from Microsoft, took programming extensive courses and did freelance gigs. Read a lot I've bought most top books from the recommended book topics here, to be honest I have not read them all. learn different languages I've tried several languages including Haskell, Java, Python, Ruby, Lisp, Prolog, C#, PHP, JS, AS3 and possibly some more I forgot. Tried to start a blog Joel recommends to learn how to write, I tried starting a couple of blogs to improve upon this, I gave up on all instances after writing about three posts. It was just not my thing... Have a portfolio of launched projects/programs I'm busy with this, have a couple of finished, working projects I worked on to show to people. So this is my last year. Is there anything else you can recommend a last year college student to do before hitting the job market? Personally I'm tempted to spend my time on the following: Practice algorithm design Learn and memorize the usage of the low level API's of your favorite language Polish your portfolio Why? Because those first two will make sure you pass the majority of the interviews, here in Holland (I could be wrong). I rather not spend my time on those first two points, but I have to be realistic and thats just my experience on what kind of questions you'll get when you apply. The third point is my hope that I won't have to answer questions about the amount of standard types in c# for example if they can see I get projects done and launched. But I'm still graduating, so I don't know anything :), and many of you might be hiring grads on a recent base and could tell me and other interested people what you wish that the recent grads you interviewed would have done before they applied.

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• Navigating through a sea of hype

  - by wouldLikeACrystalBall

  This is a vague, open question, so if you have no interest in these, please leave now. A few years ago it seemed everyone thought the death of desktop software was imminent. Web applications were the future. Everyone would move to cloud-based software-as-a-service systems, and developing applications for specific end-user platforms like Windows would soon become something of a ghetto. Joel's "How Microsoft Lost the API War" was but one of many such pieces sounding the death knell for this way of software development. Flash-forward to 2010, and the hype is all around mobile devices, particularly the iPhone. Software-as-a-Service vendors--even small ones such as YCombinator startups--go out of their way to build custom applications for the iPhone and other smart phone devices; applications that can be quite sophisticated, that run only on specific hardware and software architectures and are thus inherently incompatible. Now some of you are probably thinking, "Well, only the decline of desktop software was predicted; mobile devices aren't desktops." But the term was used by those predicting its demise to mean laptops also, and really any platform capable of running a browser. What was promised was a world where HTML and related standards would supplant native applications and their inherent difficulties. We would all code to the browser, not the OS. But here we are in 2010 with the AppStore bulging and development for the iPad just revving up. A few days ago, I saw someone on Hacker News claim that the future of computing was entirely in small, portable devices. Apparently the future is underpowered, requires dexterous thumbs and induces near-sightedness. How do those who so vehemently asserted one thing now assert the opposite with equal vehemence, without making even the slightest admission of error? And further, how are we as developers supposed to sift through all of this? I bought into the whole web-standards utopianism that was in vogue back in '06-'07 and now feel like it was a mistake. Is there some formula one can apply rather than a mere appeal to experience?

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• Mercurial Tagging/Branching Strategy

  - by Tony Trozzo

  My current project is broken down into 3 parts: Website, Desktop Client, and a Plug-in for a third party program. We had started out originally with Subversion for our source control but decided to try Mercurial after reading Joel Spolsky's final post. Considering we haven't really used the majority of svn's potential before, we figured starting fresh with some basic ideas of how source control worked would make this transition easy. However, after setting up our initial repository, we're lost as to how tagging and branching should work on a project like this. Essentially, we're working on all 3 of these parts at the same time. We want a release to be a combination of the 3 parts. Currently we're working in one repository. For the Plug-in part, we have the first iteration finished which we've been referring to as Plug-In v0.1. For the first official build of the other two parts, we'd also like to refer to them as Website v0.1 and Desktop Client v0.1. When all three parts are at v0.1, we'd like to have a Full Project v0.1. Our problem is we're not sure how to manage all of this in the Hg repository. Would the best way to handle this be to create 3 separate repositories for the 3 stable versions and then 3 more repositories for the current developments? Currently we have this all in one repository. Should we do this in branches (are branches any different from cloning repositories?) and tags? Any help is greatly appreciated.

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• Tools for Maintaining Branches in SVN

  - by Chris Conway

  My team uses SVN for source control. Recently, I've been working on a branch with occasional merges from the trunk and it's been a fairly annoying experience (cf. Joel Spolsky's "Subversion Story #1"), so I've been looking alternative ways to manage branches and merging. Given that a centralized SVN repository is non-negotiable, what I'd like is a set of tools that satisfy the following conditions. Complete revision history should be stored in SVN for both trunk and branches. Merging in either direction (and potentially criss-crossing) should be relatively painless. Merging history should be stored in SVN to the greatest extent possible. I've looked at both git-svn and bzr-svn and neither seems to be up to the job—basically, given the revision history they can export from the SVN repository, they can't seem to do any better a job handling merges than SVN can. For example, after cloning the repository with git, the revision history for my branch shows the original branch off of trunk, but git doesn't "see" any of the interim SVN merges as "native" merges—the revision history is one long line. As a result, any attempts to merge from trunk in git yield just as many conflicts as an SVN merge would. (Besides, the git-svn documentation explicitly warns against using git to merge between branches.) Is there a way to adjust my workflow to make git satisfy the above requirements? Maybe I just need tips or tricks (or a separate merging tool?) to help SVN be better at merging into branches?

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• Codility-like sites for code golfs

  - by Adam Matan

  Hi, I've run into codility.com new cool service after listening to one of the recent stackoverflow.com podcasts. In short, it presents the user with a programming riddle to solve, within a given time frame. The user writes code in an online editor, and has the ability to run the program and view the standard output. After final submission, the user sees its final score and which tests failed him. Quoting Joel Spolsky: You are given a programming problem, you can do it in Java, C++, C#, C, Pascal, Python and PHP, which is pretty cool, and you have 30 minutes. And it gives you an editor in a webpage. And you've got to just start typing your code. And it's going to time you, basically you have to do it in a certain amount of time. And it actually runs your code and determines the performance characteristics of your code. It is intended for job interview screenings, but the idea seems very cool for code-golfs and for practicing new languages. Do you know if there's any proper open replacement? Adam

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• What programming languages do the top tier Universities teach?

  - by Simucal

  I'm constantly being inundated with articles and people talking about how most of today's Universities are nothing more than Java vocational schools churning out mediocre programmer after mediocre programmer. Our very own Joel Spolsky has his famous article, "The Perils of Java Schools." Similarly, Alan Kay, a famous Computer Scientist (and SO member) has said this in the past: "I fear — as far as I can tell — that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training." - Alan Kay (link) If the languages being taught by the schools are considered such a contributing factor to the quality of the school's program then I'm curious what languages do the "top-tier" computer science schools teach (MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, etc)? If the average school is performing so poorly due in large part the languages (or lack of) that they teach then what languages do the supposed "good" cs programs teach that differentiate them? If you can, provide the name of the school you attended, followed by a list of the languages they use throughout their coursework. Edit: Shog-9 asks why I don't get this information directly from the schools websites themselves. I would, but many schools websites don't discuss the languages they use in their class descriptions. Quite a few will say, "using high-level languages we will...", without elaborating on which languages they use. So, we should be able to get a pretty accurate list of languages taught at various well known institutions from the various SO members who have attended at them.

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• Merging: hg/git vs. svn

  - by stmax

  I often read that hg (and git and...) are better at merging than svn but I have never seen practical examples of where hg/git can merge something where svn fails (or where svn needs manual intervention). Could you post a few step-by-step lists of branch/modify/commit/...-operations that show where svn would fail while hg/git happily moves on? Practical, not highly exceptional cases please... Some background: we have a few dozen developers working on projects using svn, with each project (or group of similar projects) in its own repo. We know how to apply release- and feature-branches so we don't run into problems very often (i.e. we've been there, but we've learned to overcome joel's problems of "one programmer causing trauma to the whole team" or "needing six developers for two weeks to reintegrate a branch"). We have release-branches that are very stable and only used to apply bugfixes. We have trunks that should be stable enough to be able to create a release within one week. And we have feature-branches that single developers or groups of developers can work on. Yes, they are deleted after reintegration so they don't clutter up the repository. ;) So I'm still trying to find the advantages of hg/git over svn. I'd love to get some hands-on experience, but there aren't any bigger projects we could move to hg/git yet, so I'm stuck with playing with small artifical projects that only contain a few made up files. And I'm looking for a few cases where you can feel the impressive power of hg/git, since so far I have often read about them but failed to find them myself.

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• What makes merging in DVCS easy?

  - by afriza

  I read at Joel on Software: With distributed version control, the distributed part is actually not the most interesting part. The interesting part is that these systems think in terms of changes, not in terms of versions. and at HgInit: When we have to merge, Subversion tries to look at both revisions—my modified code, and your modified code—and it tries to guess how to smash them together in one big unholy mess. It usually fails, producing pages and pages of “merge conflicts” that aren’t really conflicts, simply places where Subversion failed to figure out what we did. By contrast, while we were working separately in Mercurial, Mercurial was busy keeping a series of changesets. And so, when we want to merge our code together, Mercurial actually has a whole lot more information: it knows what each of us changed and can reapply those changes, rather than just looking at the final product and trying to guess how to put it together. By looking at the SVN's repository folder, I have the impression that Subversion is maintaining each revisions as changeset. And from what I know, Hg is using both changeset and snapshot while Git is purely using snapshot to store the data. If my assumption is correct, then there must be other ways that make merging in DVCS easy. What are those?

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• WordPerfect programmers refusing to use anything but assembler

  - by Totophil

  There is a version (popularised by Joel Spolsky) attributing the demise of WordPerfect to a refusal of its programmers to use anything but assembler that led to delay of the first WPwin release and as result eventually to losing the all important battle with Microsoft. There are a few references to programming work being done using assembler in the autobiographical book "Almost Perfect" by W. E. Pete Peterson who used to have a major influence at running the corporation. But these references go back to early 80's when WordPerfect was trying to gain a significant market share by defeating WordStar and not early nineties when the battle with MS took place. I am looking for a second independent source to confirm the assumption. Maybe someone who worked for WordPerfect Corporation at a time, who was close to the company, or had a chance to see the source could clarify the issue. Your help is much appreciated, thanks! Please note that this question is not about any other theories or reasons behind WordPerfect demise. I really just need to clarify whether they used assembler as a primary language for WPwin and (as a bonus really) whether there were discussions held within the corporation about assembler being the right choice. Concisely: Did WPCorp use assembler as a primary language for WPwin? Were discussions held at a time amongst WP Corp staff about assembler being the right choice (was it management or programmers decision)?

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• What harm can javascript do?

  - by The King

  I just happen to read the joel's blog here... So for example if you have a web page that says “What is your name?” with an edit box and then submitting that page takes you to another page that says, Hello, Elmer! (assuming the user’s name is Elmer), well, that’s a security vulnerability, because the user could type in all kinds of weird HTML and JavaScript instead of “Elmer” and their weird JavaScript could do narsty things, and now those narsty things appear to come from you, so for example they can read cookies that you put there and forward them on to Dr. Evil’s evil site. Since javascript runs on client end. All it can access or do is only on the client end. It can read informations stored in hidden fields and change them. It can read, write or manipulate cookies... But I feel, these informations are anyway available to him. (if he is smart enough to pass javascript in a textbox. So we are not empowering him with new information or providing him undue access to our server... Just curious to know whether I miss something. Can you list the things that a malicious user can do with this security hole. Edit : Thanks to all for enlightening . As kizzx2 pointed out in one of the comments... I was overlooking the fact that a JavaScript written by User A may get executed in the browser of User B under numerous circumstances, in which case it becomes a great risk.

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• How to setup Lucene search for a B2B web app?

  - by Bill Paetzke

  Given: 5000 databases (spread out over 5 servers) 1 database per client (so you can infer there are 1000 clients) 2 to 2000 users per client (let's say avg is 100 users per client) Clients (databases) come and go every day (let's assume most remain for at least one year) Let's stay agnostic of language or sql brand, since Lucene (and Solr) have a breadth of support The Question: How would you setup Lucene search so that each client can only search within its database? How would you setup the index(es)? Would you need to add a filter to all search queries? If a client cancelled, how would you delete their (part of the) index? (this may be trivial--not sure yet) Possible Solutions: Make an index for each client (database) Pro: Search is faster (than one-index-for-all method). Indices are relative to the size of the client's data. Con: I'm not sure what this entails, nor do I know if this is beyond Lucene's scope. Have a single, gigantic index with a database_name field. Always include database_name as a filter. Pro: Not sure. Maybe good for tech support or billing dept to search all databases for info. Con: Search is slower (than index-per-client method). Flawed security if query filter removed. For Example: Joel Spolsky said in Podcast #11 that his hosted web app product, FogBugz On-Demand, uses Lucene. He has thousands of on-demand clients. And each client gets their own database. His situation is quite similar to mine. Although, he didn't elaborate on the setup (particularly indices); hence, the need for this question. One last thing: I would also accept an answer that uses Solr (the extension of Lucene). Perhaps it's better suited for this problem. Not sure.

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• Enforce strong type checking in C (type strictness for typedefs)

  - by quinmars

  Is there a way to enforce explicit cast for typedefs of the same type? I've to deal with utf8 and sometimes I get confused with the indices for the character count and the byte count. So it be nice to have some typedefs: typedef unsigned int char_idx_t; typedef unsigned int byte_idx_t; With the addition that you need an explicit cast between them: char_idx_t a = 0; byte_idx_t b; b = a; // compile warning b = (byte_idx_t) a; // ok I know that such a feature doesn't exist in C, but maybe you know a trick or a compiler extension (preferable gcc) that does that. EDIT: I still don't really like the Hungarian notation in general, I couldn't used it for this problem because of project coding conventions, but I used it now in another similar case, where also the types are the same and the meanings are very similar. And I have to admit: it helps. I never would go and declare every integer with a starting "i", but as in Joel's example for overlapping types, it can be life saving.

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• Building a CMS in PHP: Development tools

  - by TRiG

  I'm planning to build a CMS in PHP and MySQL, mainly for my own amusement and education. (Though who knows, I may come up with something useful and cool. Anything's possible.) I'll be asking questions about code architecture etc. later. For now, I'm more interested in development tools. So far, all my playing with code has been done on a web server, and I've edited over FTP. I was thinking it might be quicker to use a localhost. Also, that way, I could use version control (which I've never done before). So, A. How do I set up a localhost server with many subdomains on an Ubuntu 9.10 computer. Is XAMPP for Linux the way to go, or should I use a standard Apache distro? (Or another webserver altogether?) For that matter, is it possible to set up more than one webserver on the same computer, and to use them for different localhost subdomains? B. How do I set up a version control thingy covering all the code (which will be on several subdomains of localhost, and in a few shared folders)? I've read Joel Spolsky's HgInt tutorial, and it makes Mercurial look good. And simple, especially if you're working on your own. C. Should I continue to use gEdit to write HTML/CSS/JS/PHP, or is there a better free editor out there for these languages?

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• How do I populate a MEF plugin with data that is not hard coded into the assembly?

  - by hjoelr

  I am working on a program that will communicate with various pieces of hardware. Because of the varied nature of the items it communicates and controls, I need to have a different "driver" for each different piece of hardware. This made me think that MEF would be a great way to make those drivers as plugins that can be added even after the product has been released. I've looked at a lot of examples of how to use MEF, but the question that I haven't been able to find an answer to is how to populate a MEF plugin with external data (eg. from a database). All the examples I can find have the "data" hard-coded into the assembly, like the following example: [Export( typeof( IRule ) )] public class RuleInstance : IRule { public void DoIt() {} public string Name { get { return "Rule Instance 3"; } } public string Version { get { return "1.1.0.0"; } } public string Description { get { return "Some Rule Instance"; } } } What if I want Name, Version and Description to come from a database? How would I tell MEF where to get that information? I may be missing something very obvious, but I don't know what it is. Thanks! Joel

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• The Implications of Modern Day Software Development Abstractions

  - by Andreas Grech

  I am currently doing a dissertation about the implications or dangers that today's software development practices or teachings may have on the long term effects of programming. Just to make it clear: I am not attacking the use abstractions in programming. Every programmer knows that abstractions are the bases for modularity. What I want to investigate with this dissertation are the positive and negative effects abstractions can have in software development. As regards the positive, I am sure that I can find many sources that can confirm this. But what about the negative effects of abstractions? Do you have any stories to share that talk about when certain abstractions failed on you? The main concern is that many programmers today are programming against abstractions without having the faintest idea of what the abstraction is doing under-the-covers. This may very well lead to bugs and bad design. So, in you're opinion, how important is it that programmers actually know what is going below the abstractions? Taking a simple example from Joel's Back to Basics, C's strcat: void strcat( char* dest, char* src ) { while (*dest) dest++; while (*dest++ = *src++); } The above function hosts the issue that if you are doing string concatenation, the function is always starting from the beginning of the dest pointer to find the null terminator character, whereas if you write the function as follows, you will return a pointer to where the concatenated string is, which in turn allows you to pass this new pointer to the concatenation function as the *dest parameter: char* mystrcat( char* dest, char* src ) { while (*dest) dest++; while (*dest++ = *src++); return --dest; } Now this is obviously a very simple as regards abstractions, but it is the same concept I shall be investigating. Finally, what do you think about the issue that schools are preferring to teach Java instead of C and Lisp ? Can you please give your opinions and your says as regards this subject? Thank you for your time and I appreciate every comment.

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• F# and statically checked union cases

  - by Johan Jonasson

  Soon me and my brother-in-arms Joel will release version 0.9 of Wing Beats. It's an internal DSL written in F#. With it you can generate XHTML. One of the sources of inspiration have been the XHTML.M module of the Ocsigen framework. I'm not used to the OCaml syntax, but I do understand XHTML.M somehow statically check if attributes and children of an element are of valid types. We have not been able to statically check the same thing in F#, and now I wonder if someone have any idea of how to do it? My first naive approach was to represent each element type in XHTML as a union case. But unfortunately you cannot statically restrict which cases are valid as parameter values, as in XHTML.M. Then I tried to use interfaces (each element type implements an interface for each valid parent) and type constraints, but I didn't manage to make it work without the use of explicit casting in a way that made the solution cumbersome to use. And it didn't feel like an elegant solution anyway. Today I've been looking at Code Contracts, but it seems to be incompatible with F# Interactive. When I hit alt + enter it freezes. Just to make my question clearer. Here is a super simple artificial example of the same problem: type Letter = | Vowel of string | Consonant of string let writeVowel = function | Vowel str -> sprintf "%s is a vowel" str I want writeVowel to only accept Vowels statically, and not as above, check it at runtime. How can we accomplish this? Does anyone have any idea? There must be a clever way of doing it. If not with union cases, maybe with interfaces? I've struggled with this, but am trapped in the box and can't think outside of it.

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• How does Amazon's Statistically Improbable Phrases work?

  - by ??iu

  How does something like Statistically Improbable Phrases work? According to amazon: Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, or "SIPs", are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book. SIPs are not necessarily improbable within a particular book, but they are improbable relative to all books in Search Inside!. For example, most SIPs for a book on taxes are tax related. But because we display SIPs in order of their improbability score, the first SIPs will be on tax topics that this book mentions more often than other tax books. For works of fiction, SIPs tend to be distinctive word combinations that often hint at important plot elements. For instance, for Joel's first book, the SIPs are: leaky abstractions, antialiased text, own dog food, bug count, daily builds, bug database, software schedules One interesting complication is that these are phrases of either 2 or 3 words. This makes things a little more interesting because these phrases can overlap with or contain each other.

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• Refactoring or Rewriting Monolithic PHP Spaghetti Codebase

  - by nategood

  I've inherited a really poorly designed PHP spaghetti code project. It's been gaining a good bit of traffic recently and is starting to have performance issues on top of the poor monolithic code base. Its maxing out performance on a chunky 16GB dedicated machine when it really shouldn't be. I'm planning on doing some performance tweaks right off the bat to help the performance issue, but this still won't really help the horrible code base. The team is small but expecting to grow very soon. I've read Joel's article on the troubles of doing a complete rewrite and see the concerns. But how bad does the code base have to be before you consider a rewrite? There is PHP handling logic interjected into what one would usually consider a "view". Even worse, in some places SQL statements are in these same files! The only real separation of presentation and logic are a few PHP scripts that serve as function libraries. These scripts do most of the ORM stuff... if you can even call it that. Trying to slowly refractor this seems like a nightmare. Open to your thoughts and opinions... however not interested in hearing, "Run away, Run away!".

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• UML diagrams that are actually pretty?

  - by Borek

  I'm looking for a diagramming software that would produce good looking output. It doesn't need to support everything (or even much) from UML, is doesn't need to have code engineering functions or anything, it just needs to produce visually interesting output. Here is a couple of samples of products that I consider ugly / not good enough: Visio with default UML stencils (didn't find better looking ones), Enterprise Architect, Dia, ArgoUML and many other "professional" UML tools. A couple of visually compelling tools that I considered (but found issues with): Visual Studio class diagrams - just for .NET classes but the output is miles better than what UML tools typically produce NClass - similar to VS's class diagrams but I could not find the "pretty", blue skin anywhere yuml.me - very nice but lacking some advanced layout options. I have to say that I find their style almost ideal for high-level diagrams - they look sketchy which is good. Balsamiq - I think Joel used this for hginit.com and I liked it. However, it's not suited for creating software diagrams so I can imagine it would be quite a lot of work MS Word has actually quite a good graphics engine but I'd rather leave this as a choice of the last resort I'd be grateful for any good tips.

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• Should developers *really* have private offices?

  - by Aron Rotteveel

  We will probably be moving within a year, so we have to make some decisions regarding office layout. At the moment, our company is basically one big office. When our developers can't bother to be disturbed at all, we all have our own headphones to mute the outside world. Still, it seems a lot of people feel that private offices are no doubt the way to go. From Joel's article Private Offices Redux: Not every programmer in the world wants to work in a private office. In fact quite a few would tell you unequivocally that they prefer the camaradarie and easy information sharing of an open space. Don't fall for it. They also want M&Ms for breakfast and a pony. Open space is fun but not productive. Even though I can understand the benefit on productivity, does having a private office really result in more net productivity? There seem to be plenty of companies that create wide open spaces and still maintain good productivity. Or so it seems. (I should mention many of them use cubicles, though) What is your opinion on this? What does your company do? Is there some middle ground in this? Some more related information on this matter: Private Offices Redux The new Fog Creek office A Field Guide to Developers Gmail recruitment page. Found this last one somewhat remarkable since the Gmail recruitment page promotes the "wide open space" idea.

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• Short snippet summarizing a webpage?

  - by Legend

  Is there a clean way of grabbing the first few lines of a given link that summarizes that link? I have seen this being done in some online bookmarking applications but have no clue on how they were implemented. For instance, if I give this link, I should be able to get a summary which is roughly like: I'll admit it, I was intimidated by MapReduce. I'd tried to read explanations of it, but even the wonderful Joel Spolsky left me scratching my head. So I plowed ahead trying to build decent pipelines to process massive amounts of data Nothing complex at first sight but grabbing these is the challenging part. Just the first few lines of the actual post should be fine. Should I just use a raw approach of grabbing the entire html and parsing the meta tags or something fancy like that (which obviously and unfortunately is not generalizable to every link out there) or is there a smarter way to achieve this? Any suggestions? Update: I just found InstaPaper do this but am not sure if it is getting the information from RSS feeds or some other way.

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• Is "tip-of-the-day" good?

  - by Jonta

  Many programs (often large ones, like MS Office, The GIMP, Maxthon) have a feature called "tip-of-the-day". It explains a small part of the program, like this one in Maxthon: "You can hide/show the main menu bar by pressing Ctrl+F11" You can usually browse through them by clicking next. And other options provided are "Previous", "Close", "Do not show at startup". I think I like the way Maxthon used to handle this; in the browser's statusbar (down at the bottom usually, together with "Done", the progress-bar etc), there would sometimes be a small hint or tip on what else you could do with it. As Joel Spolsky wrote in his article-series "User Interface Design for Programmers", people don't like reading manuals. But we still want them to use the program, and the features they could benefit from, don't we? Therefore, I think it is useful to have such a feature, without the annoyance of the pop-up on startup. What do you think? Pop-up? Maxthonstyle? No way?

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• Bad idea to force creation of Mercurial remote heads (ie. branches)?

  - by Chad Johnson

  I am developing a centralized web application, and I have a centralized Mercurial repository. Locally I created a branch in my repository hg branch my_branch I then made some changes and committed. Then when I try to push, I get abort: push creates new remote branch 'my_branch'! (did you forget to merge? use push -f to force) I've just been using push -f. Is this bad? I WANT multiple branches in my central, remote repository, as I want to 1) back up my work and 2) allow other developers to develop with me on that branch. Is it bad or something to have branches in my remote repository or something? Should I not be doing push -f (and if not, what should I do?)? Why does Joel say this in his tutorial: Occasionally I've made a change in a branch, pushed, switched to another branch, and changes I had made in that branch I switch to were mysteriously reverted to a previous version from several commits ago. Maybe this is a symptom of forcing a push?

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