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• Is anyone teaching the application of ethics to programming?

  - by blueberryfields

  Ethical questions come up more and more in the news, and can be core to a software developers' life. On several occasions this year I was asked for advice that amounts to answering ethical questions, in a computer programming context, and I was surprised to see how much fretting and trouble questions which I consider trivial can lead to. Are there any courses or programs specializing in teaching what is expected of an ethical programmer? Has anyone put together a formal curriculum anywhere?

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• Is there such a thing as "closure" with software work?

  - by Bobby Tables

  I burned out last year (after a decade of fulltime programming jobs) and am on a sabbatical now. With all the self-examination I've started to figure out some of the root causes of my burnout, and one of the major ones is basically this: there was never any real closure in any of the work I've ever done. It was always a case of getting into an open-ended support/maintenance grind and going stale. When I first entered the industry, I had this image of programming work being very project-based. And I expected projects to have a start, beginning, and END. And then you move on and start on something totally new and fresh. Basically I never expected that a lot (most) of software work involves supporting and maintaining the same code base for open-ended long periods of time - years and even decades. That, combined with generally having itchy feet makes me think that burnout is inevitable for me, after 2-3 years, in ANY fulltime software job. All this sounds like I probably should have been a contractor instead of a fulltimer. But when I discuss this with people, a lot of them say that even THEN you can't really escape having to go back and maintain/support the stuff you worked on, over and over (eg. Coming back on support contracts, for example). The nature of software work is simply like that. There is no project closure, unlike in many other engineering fields. So my question is - Is there ANY programming work out there which is based on short to mid term projects/stints and then moving on cleanly? And is there any particular industry domain or specialization where this kind of project work is typical?

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• Who was your mentor? Where can I find mine?

  - by aredkid

  In many of articles I've read, finding a mentor is often suggested. One to who would guide, teach and more. (I wouldn't know the details, I don't have one, yet.) So, who was your mentor, if any? I have only had indirect mentors: professor at university, manager at work whom I've watched and learnt from the most. And otherwise, Twitter has been a great place to follow the professionals and discover more about the technologies that interest me. But I still wonder how I could find one because I can sense that I might be lacking in my experience. Ideas?

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• Opinion of OSCON?

  - by 16bytes

  This year I have the opportunity to travel to the conference of my choice and thus far have been looking at OSCON. For those who have attended, what is your opinion of the conference? Any tips/tricks? Any tips to effectively plan what to see/attend? Any suggestions for lesser known conferences? As a working programmer, my interest is pretty general; I want to learn more about up-and-coming tech that I may have a chance to use and/or use more effectively.

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• ROI in choosing a CMS solution

  - by Tio

  At the company I work for we need a CMS. The question is, what to choose, for me I think the best solution is to develop one of our own, but we ( my boss and I ), talked about using Drupal. But my boss is completely non-technical, and want's to take a lot of shortcut's which for programming is utterly bad. Too many shortcut's ( and that's why just last Friday we had a bug on one of our systems that caused a lot of panic ). So I'm trying to investigate on the ROI of using already existing CMS solutions VS developing our own customized CMS ( based on a open source library or not ). So that I can sell this to my boss. I'm almost sure that developing a customized CMS is the best for our small company. After a search on google I found this: Choose between a commercial, open source, or customized CMS, but the link is from 2003, it has some truth's, but the world changed a lot from 2003. But I can't seem to find anything else about it. I've developed my own CMS, so I know it's not the most easy thing to do, and that it takes time. Can someone give me any tips? EDIT: With CMS I mean Content Management System, to manage the webpages of our clients.

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• The best way to have a pointer to several methods - critique requested

  - by user827992

  I'm starting with a short introduction of what i know from the C language: a pointer is a type that stores an adress or a NULL the * operator reads the left value of the variable on its right and use this value as address and reads the value of the variable at that address the & operator generate a pointer to the variable on its right so i was thinking that in C++ the pointers can work this way too, but i was wrong, to generate a pointer to a static method i have to do this: #include <iostream> class Foo{ public: static void dummy(void){ std::cout << "I'm dummy" << std::endl; }; }; int main(){ void (*p)(); p = Foo::dummy; // step 1 p(); p = &(Foo::dummy); // step 2 p(); p = Foo; // step 3 p->dummy(); return(0); } now i have several questions: why step 1 works why step 2 works too, looks like a "pointer to pointer" for p to me, very different from step 1 why step 3 is the only one that doesn't work and is the only one that makes some sort of sense to me, honestly how can i write an array of pointers or a pointer to pointers structure to store methods ( static or non-static from real objects ) what is the best syntax and coding style for generating a pointer to a method?

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• How to convince my boss to improve code quality?

  - by Vimvq1987

  The place I'm working for is a service provider. We have a lot of services, which are written to deal with deadline, so their code are really terrible: No coding convention, everyone codes in his own style No unit testing (which is really bad) No refactoring (which is truly worse) No automation build/deployment etc and these code are used again and again, so bad code continue to spread all over my department. I really want to set up a standard quality for our code, by requiring everyone to follow "rules": every line of code which does not follow convention will be rejected, and every function of code which does not pass unit testing will not be committed,...But I don't know how to convince my boss to allow me to do this. I'm relatively new comer, so inspiring people from my works is really hard, and I think it's easier if my boss support me to this. Thank you very much for your advices

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• What would you think of a job based on mostly doing the proof of concept?

  - by davsan

  I'm working as a developer in a small software company whose main job is interfacing between separate applications, like between a telephony system and an environment control system, between IP TVs and hospitality systems, etc...And it seems like I am the candidate for a new job title in the company, as the person who does the proof of concept of a new interfacing project and does some R&D for prototyping. What do you think the pros and cons of such a job would be, considering mainly the individual progress/regress of a person as a software engineer? And what aspects would you consider essential in a person to put him/her in such a job position?

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• How do you KISS?

  - by Conor

  The KISS principle is a highly quoted design mantra. The aim of this principle is to stamp out unnecessary complexity on a project. This is a good thing, saving time, energy and money. It can lead to a relatively stress free implementation and a simple, elegant, maintainable end product. A lot of discussion on KISS provides mechanisms to simplify requirements, design and implementation. Things that spring to mind include: avoid scope creep; simple obvious design and code; minimal run-time dependencies; refactoring to maintain simplicity; etc. However there are a lot of implicit things that we do to KISS. Examples: small team sizes; minimal management layers; tidy desk; mastery of a single IDE; clear concise error messages; scripts to automate/encapsulate tasks; etc Why KISS practices do you apply? How have they been of benefit? I'm especially interested in non-obvious practices.

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• Sign In With Facebook - Business Issues

  - by Joshiatto

  I've got an issue where this company wants to provide all sorts of whiz bang features to their users that require an insane number of facebook permissions for their FB app. Being that my name is going to be attached to this, I would rather give them a solution which allows for easy sign in and asks for the minimum permissions up front. This would give them a huge boost in registrations and activity publishing across the site with the potential to "go viral". If we ask for a ton of permissions up front I know for a fact we will not go viral and will probably incur much wrath from the blogosphere. What would you do?

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• Can non-IT people handle a wiki?

  - by Andrew Heath

  (I'm hoping that some of you will have encountered this issue before and can offer some insights...) My company is looking to improve their market research data management. Current data management style: "Hey Jimbo, where's that picture of our WhatZit 2.0? "yeah I remember that email about that company from that guy, gimme a few minutes to search my Outlook" "who has the newest copy of the Important Competitor's product catalogue? Mine is from '09." ... "Colleen does, and she's on maternity leave. You'll have to call her to get her workstation password..." Desired data management style: data organized neatly by topic (legal, economic, industrial, competitor) for each topic, multiple media types stored together (company product images, press releases, contact info) but still neatly sorted by type data editing histories communal access (no data silos) I was thinking about setting up a department wiki for all users to access. It seems to satisfy the four criteria above, but I'm a little concerned about how user-friendly (read: decipherable to non-technical people) it is for the more advanced features like image galleries, article formatting, and the like. Has anyone here setup a wiki for non-IT people and had it not catch on fire//become a ghost town//look like Geocities? Bonus question: can you see any obvious drawbacks to my choice of MediaWiki (or any other wiki) for solving this problem? Thank you.

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• SQL: empty string vs NULL value

  - by Jacek Prucia

  I know this subject is a bit controversial and there are a lot of various articles/opinions floating around the internet. Unfortunatelly, most of them assume the person doesn't know what the difference between NULL and empty string is. So they tell stories about surprising results with joins/aggregates and generally do a bit more advanced SQL lessons. By doing this, they absolutely miss the whole point and are therefore useless for me. So hopefully this question and all answers will move subject a bit forward. Let's suppose I have a table with personal information (name, birth, etc) where one of the columns is an email address with varchar type. We assume that for some reason some people might not want to provide an email address. When inserting such data (without email) into the table, there are two available choices: set cell to NULL or set it to empty string (''). Let's assume that I'm aware of all the technical implications of choosing one solution over another and I can create correct SQL queries for either scenario. The problem is even when both values differ on the technical level, they are exactly the same on logical level. After looking at NULL and '' I came to a single conclusion: I don't know email address of the guy. Also no matter how hard i tried, I was not able to sent an e-mail using either NULL or empty string, so apparently most SMTP servers out there agree with my logic. So i tend to use NULL where i don't know the value and consider empty string a bad thing. After some intense discussions with colleagues i came with two questions: am I right in assuming that using empty string for an unknown value is causing a database to "lie" about the facts? To be more precise: using SQL's idea of what is value and what is not, I might come to conclusion: we have e-mail address, just by finding out it is not null. But then later on, when trying to send e-mail I'll come to contradictory conclusion: no, we don't have e-mail address, that @!#$ Database must have been lying! Is there any logical scenario in which an empty string '' could be such a good carrier of important information (besides value and no value), which would be troublesome/inefficient to store by any other way (like additional column). I've seen many posts claiming that sometimes it's good to use empty string along with real values and NULLs, but so far haven't seen a scenario that would be logical (in terms of SQL/DB design). P.S. Some people will be tempted to answer, that it is just a matter of personal taste. I don't agree. To me it is a design decision with important consequences. So i'd like to see answers where opion about this is backed by some logical and/or technical reasons.

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• How to choose a new technology for mastering and not lose sense of reality and practicality?

  - by Eyewan

  How to choose the right next step in learning programming and mastering new technologies? I have experience with WinForms applications in C# .NET. Next what I see as a good area of expanding the knowledge is ASP.NET. Language I already know, C #, so I think there is now more a matter of mastering new technologies. Also I have interest in WPF. Perhaps the best is to work on ASP.NET and WPF at the same time. Sometimes the problem is when we do not have motivation, but also known to become a problem when we want to much :) How to choose a new technology for mastering and not lose sense of reality and practicality?

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• How exactly is an Abstract Syntax Tree created?

  - by Howcan

  I think I understand the goal of an AST, and I've build a couple of tree structures before, but never an AST. I'm mostly confused because the nodes are text and not number, so I can't think of a nice way to input a token/string as I'm parsing some code. For example, when I looked at diagrams of AST's, the variable and its value were leaf nodes to an equal sign. This makes perfect sense to me, but how would I go about implementing this? I guess I can do it case by case, so that when I stumble upon an "=" I use that as a node, and add the value parsed before the "=" as the leaf. It just seems wrong, because I'd probably have to make cases for tons and tons of things, depending on the syntax. And then I came upon another problem, how is the tree traversed? Do I go all the way down the height, and go back up a node when I hit the bottom, and do the same for it's neighbor? I've seen tons of diagrams on ASTs, but I couldn't find a fairly simple example of one in code, which would probably help.

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• Is conditional return type ever a good idea?

  - by qegal

  So I have a method that's something like this: -(BOOL)isSingleValueRecord And another method like this: -(Type)typeOfSingleValueRecord And it occurred to me that I could combine them into something like this: -(id)isSingleValueRecord And have the implementation be something like this: -(id)isSingleValueRecord { //If it is single value if(self.recordValue = 0) { //Do some stuff to determine type, then return it return typeOfSingleValueRecord; } //If its not single value else { //Return "NO" return [NSNumber numberWithBool:NO]; } } So combining the two methods makes it more efficient but makes the readability go down. In my gut, I feel like I should go with the two-method version, but is that really right? Is there any case that I should go with the combined version?

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• How to diagram custom programming languages, non textual?

  - by Adam

  I've used and created domain-specific languages before, plenty of times (e.g. using yacc/lex). Normally we'd start with grammar written in BNF, and a bunch of keywords. This is easy to do, easy to share. Recently, I've started working with diagrammatic programming languages - closest parallel is circuit-diagrams in electronics, where it's very difficult to express ideas in text, but very easy to express them in wiring-diagrams. This is a new and novel problem for me: how to efficiently express these mini-languages, and share concepts in them with colleagues? (i.e. how to whiteboard-program within them. Actual programming is easy - you have physical components to hand) Are there tools for this? Or good/best practices (e.g. equivalent of "always use BNF as starting point for your new DSL, and use tools like yacc to generate the parser, compiler, etc"). My googlefu is proving weak - all I get is false positives for wiring diagrams, and UML editors (since these are custom languages, UML doesn't seem to help)

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• Help migrating from VB style programming to OO programming [closed]

  - by Agent47DarkSoul

  Being a hobbyist Java developer, I quickly took on with OO programming and understood its advantages over procedural code from C, that I did in college. But I couldn't grasp VB event based code (weird, right?). Bottom-line is OOP came natural to me. Curently I work in a small development firm developing C# applications. My peers here are a bit attached to VB style programming. Most of the C# code written is VB6 event handling code in C#'s skin. I tried explaining to them OOP with its advantages but it wasn't clear to them, maybe because I have never been much of a VB programmer. So can anybody provide any resources: books, web articles on how to migrate from VB style to OO style programming ?

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• Open Source sponsored feature development

  - by Suma

  I am considering to sponsor a development of some particular features in some Open Source tools. I would like the results of the work to be available publicly, and if possible, to be included in the main product line. The features are usually something which is of general use, but not very critical, and no one has currently a plan to develop it. For illustration, imagine I would like to use MinGW for Win32 development, but I miss a post mortem debugging option, I would like this feature to be implemented and I am willing to pay $1000 for it. Is there some common way how to proceed, or is this wildly per-project dependent? Are there some general guidelines how to contact the product developers, or are there some common meeting places where smart open source people who might interested to participate in such sponsored development meet, which I should visit to advertise the sponsoring option? Are there some specific ways how to talk about the job to be more attractive to people participating in open source (e.g. it might be more interesting for them to participate in a contest than just to take a payed job, which might have a bit of mundane feel)? Or perhaps is this something which you think has little chance to succeed, because perhaps money has very little value for open source developers? Any tips and experiences from someone who has some experience of open source sponsorhip from any side (sponsor or the developer) are welcome.

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• Building non (jsp/freemarker) template based website [on hold]

  - by Ismail Marmoush

  If my web app is supposed to work in one page, something like asana.com, and I wanted to make the whole website free of templates, meaning I would serve data and make js/mobile app call them, or even let other developers create new interfaces for it. So is it acceptable to have such a design for such a problem ? or you think I would eventually have use jsps/freemarker for a certain case. I found something when I started asking the right questions, here is it wiki: Single Page Application

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• best way to "introduce" OOP/OOD to team of experienced C++ engineers

  - by DXM

  I am looking for an efficient way, that also doesn't come off as an insult, to introduce OOP concepts to existing team members? My teammates are not new to OO languages. We've been doing C++/C# for a long time so technology itself is familiar. However, I look around and without major infusion of effort (mostly in the form of code reviews), it seems what we are producing is C code that happens to be inside classes. There's almost no use of single responsibility principle, abstractions or attempts to minimize coupling, just to name a few. I've seen classes that don't have a constructor but get memset to 0 every time they are instantiated. But every time I bring up OOP, everyone always nods and makes it seem like they know exactly what I'm talking about. Knowing the concepts is good, but we (some more than others) seem to have very hard time applying them when it comes to delivering actual work. Code reviews have been very helpful but the problem with code reviews is that they only occur after the fact so to some it seems we end up rewriting (it's mostly refactoring, but still takes lots of time) code that was just written. Also code reviews only give feedback to an individual engineer, not the entire team. I am toying with the idea of doing a presentation (or a series) and try to bring up OOP again along with some examples of existing code that could've been written better and could be refactored. I could use some really old projects that no one owns anymore so at least that part shouldn't be a sensitive issue. However, will this work? As I said most people have done C++ for a long time so my guess is that a) they'll sit there thinking why I'm telling them stuff they already know or b) they might actually take it as an insult because I'm telling them they don't know how to do the job they've been doing for years if not decades. Is there another approach which would reach broader audience than a code review would, but at the same time wouldn't feel like a punishment lecture? I'm not a fresh kid out of college who has utopian ideals of perfectly designed code and I don't expect that from anyone. The reason I'm writing this is because I just did a review of a person who actually had decent high-level design on paper. However if you picture classes: A - B - C - D, in the code B, C and D all implement almost the same public interface and B/C have one liner functions so that top-most class A is doing absolutely all the work (down to memory management, string parsing, setup negotiations...) primarily in 4 mongo methods and, for all intents and purposes, calls almost directly into D. Update: I'm a tech lead(6 months in this role) and do have full support of the group manager. We are working on a very mature product and maintenance costs are definitely letting themselves be known.

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• Monitoring C++ applications

  - by Scott A

  We're implementing a new centralized monitoring solution (Zenoss). Incorporating servers, networking, and Java programs is straightforward with SNMP and JMX. The question, however, is what are the best practices for monitoring and managing custom C++ applications in large, heterogenous (Solaris x86, RHEL Linux, Windows) environments? Possibilities I see are: Net SNMP Advantages single, central daemon on each server well-known standard easy integration into monitoring solutions we run Net SNMP daemons on our servers already Disadvantages: complex implementation (MIBs, Net SNMP library) new technology to introduce for the C++ developers rsyslog Advantages single, central daemon on each server well-known standard unknown integration into monitoring solutions (I know they can do alerts based on text, but how well would it work for sending telemetry like memory usage, queue depths, thread capacity, etc) simple implementation Disadvantages: possible integration issues somewhat new technology for C++ developers possible porting issues if we switch monitoring vendors probably involves coming up with an ad-hoc communication protocol (or using RFC5424 structured data; I don't know if Zenoss supports that without custom Zenpack coding) Embedded JMX (embed a JVM and use JNI) Advantages consistent management interface for both Java and C++ well-known standard easy integration into monitoring solutions somewhat simple implementation (we already do this today for other purposes) Disadvantages: complexity (JNI, thunking layer between native C++ and Java, basically writing the management code twice) possible stability problems requires a JVM in each process, using considerably more memory JMX is new technology for C++ developers each process has it's own JMX port (we run a lot of processes on each machine) Local JMX daemon, processes connect to it Advantages single, central daemon on each server consistent management interface for both Java and C++ well-known standard easy integration into monitoring solutions Disadvantages: complexity (basically writing the management code twice) need to find or write such a daemon need a protocol between the JMX daemon and the C++ process JMX is new technology for C++ developers CodeMesh JunC++ion Advantages consistent management interface for both Java and C++ well-known standard easy integration into monitoring solutions single, central daemon on each server when run in shared JVM mode somewhat simple implementation (requires code generation) Disadvantages: complexity (code generation, requires a GUI and several rounds of tweaking to produce the proxied code) possible JNI stability problems requires a JVM in each process, using considerably more memory (in embedded mode) Does not support Solaris x86 (deal breaker) Even if it did support Solaris x86, there are possible compiler compatibility issues (we use an odd combination of STLPort and Forte on Solaris each process has it's own JMX port when run in embedded mode (we run a lot of processes on each machine) possibly precludes a shared JMX server for non-C++ processes (?) Is there some reasonably standardized, simple solution I'm missing? Given no other reasonable solutions, which of these solutions is typically used for custom C++ programs? My gut feel is that Net SNMP is how people do this, but I'd like other's input and experience before I make a decision.

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• Should we choose Java over C# or we should consider using Mono?

  - by A. Karimi

  We are a small team of independent developers with an average experience of 7 years in C#/.NET platform. We almost work on small to average web application projects that allows us to choose our favorite platform. I believe that our current platform (C#/.NET) allows us to be more productive than if we were working in Java but what makes me think about choosing Java over C# is the costs and the community (of the open source). Our projects allow us even work with various frameworks as well as various platforms. For example we can even use Nancy. So we are able to decrease the costs by using Mono which can be deployed on Linux servers. But I'm looking for a complete ecosystem (IDE/Platform/Production Environment) that decreases our costs and makes us feel completely supported by the community. As an example of issues I've experienced with MonoDevelop, I can refer to the poor support of the Razor syntax on MonoDevelop. As another example, We are using "VS 2012 Express for Web" as our IDE to decrease the costs but as you know it doesn't support plugins and I have serious problems with XML comments (I missed GhostDoc). We strongly believe in strongly-typed programming languages so please don't offer the other languages and platforms such as Ruby, PHP, etc. Now I want to choose between: Keep going on C#, buy some products and be hopeful about openness of .NET ecosystem and its open source community. Changing the platform and start using the Java open source ecosystem

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• What do you need to know to get a job as a web developer

  - by Alex Foster

  What do you need to know to at the very least get your foot in the door? We're assuming for someone who doesn't have a college degree (yet) but will eventually get one. My guess is html, css, javascript, and php, and photoshop and dreamweaver, and sql. And being familiar with using a web host to have sites live, like knowing how to use cpanel. It's probably a very inaccurate and narrow guess but that's what i think right now. I don't know exactly.

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• How to execute a Ruby file in Java, capable of calling functions from the Java program and receiving primitive-type results?

  - by Omega

  I do not fully understand what am I asking (lol!), well, in the sense of if it is even possible, that is. If it isn't, sorry. Suppose I have a Java program. It has a Main and a JavaCalculator class. JavaCalculator has some basic functions like public int sum(int a,int b) { return a + b } Now suppose I have a ruby file. Called MyProgram.rb. MyProgram.rb may contain anything you could expect from a ruby program. Let us assume it contains the following: class RubyMain def initialize print "The sum of 5 with 3 is #{sum(5,3)}" end def sum(a,b) # <---------- Something will happen here end end rubyMain = RubyMain.new Good. Now then, you might already suspect what I want to do: I want to run my Java program I want it to execute the Ruby file MyProgram.rb When the Ruby program executes, it will create an instance of JavaCalculator, execute the sum function it has, get the value, and then print it. The ruby file has been executed successfully. The Java program closes. Note: The "create an instance of JavaCalculator" is not entirely necessary. I would be satisfied with just running a sum function from, say, the Main class. My question: is such possible? Can I run a Java program which internally executes a Ruby file which is capable of commanding the Java program to do certain things and get results? In the above example, the Ruby file asks the Java program to do a sum for it and give the result. This may sound ridiculous. I am new in this kind of thing (if it is possible, that is). WHY AM I ASKING THIS? I have a Java program, which is some kind of game engine. However, my target audience is a bunch of Ruby coders. I don't want to have them learn Java at all. So I figured that perhaps the Java program could simply offer the functionality (capacity to create windows, display sprites, play sounds...) and then, my audience can simply code with Ruby the logic, which basically justs asks my Java engine to do things like displaying sprites or playing sounds. That's when I though about asking this.

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• Where to place the R code for R+Sweave+LaTeX workflow

  - by claytontstanley

  I spent the last week learning 3 new tools: R, Sweave, and LaTeX. One question that came to my mind though when working through my first project: Where do I place the majority of the R code? The tutorials that I read online placed the majority of the R code in the LaTeX .Rnw file. However, I find having a bunch of R calculations in the LaTeX file distracting. What I do find extremely helpful (of course) is to call out to R code in the LaTeX file and embed the result. So the workflow I've been using is to place 99% of my R code in my .R file. I run that file first, save a bunch of calculations as objects, and output the .Rout file once finished (to save the work). Then when running Sweave, I load up that .Rout file, so that I have the majority of my calculations already completed and in the Sweave R session. Then my LaTeX callouts to R are quite simple: Just give me the XTable stored in 'res.table', or give me the result of an already-computed calculation stored in the variable 'res'. So I push towards the minimal amount of R code in the LaTex file possible, to achieve the desired result (embedding stats results in the LaTeX writeup). Does anyone have any experience with this approach? I'm just worried I might run into trouble further down the line, when I start really trying to load up and leverage this workflow.

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