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  • How do we, as a community, help encourage programming in public schools? (Or state Schools for the U

    - by NoMoreZealots
    PRIMARY MOTIVATION My office gets involved with the "First Robotics" competitions and one thing that lingers year to year is the students typically have no preparation for doing even simple programming as part of the public schools system. While the science classes provide some basic grasp of mechanical and electrical concepts, by in large computer programming gets no coverage from the curriculum. (This my be different in other areas of the country/world.) What makes it worse is there is only a short period of time you have to prepare the student's and help them design the robot. Talking to some professors from local colleges, it's a problem because you can't assume even the most basic understanding for freshman CS majors. Languages like Python, Lua and BASIC are simple enough for at least high school level students, if not younger. SCOPE So how do you get public schools to support a programming, at least to the level of "Try it in BASIC" examples that used to be at the end of a chapter in my Algebra book? At least enough to prepare them for event's such as the FIRST Robotic competitions. Which the primary objectives are to teach problem solving and team work, and to possible foster an interest in Math, Science and Engineering in general. (Not force feed to them, as some people her seem to be implying.) Edit: Why teach kids: (Since 2000 CS enrollment in US colleges has decreased by 70% while college enrollment has increased, this is a PROBLEM.) Saying there is no value in teaching someone programming in Jr./High school because they might think "they know programming." Is like saying there's no value in teaching High school science and physics, because they might decide they "know physics." Leading to abuse like: "I passed a high school physics class, I'm going to develop a Unified Quantum Gravitational Theory." Better Prepared students are better students. Instead it would allows college programs to raise the bar on the entry level courses, allowing students to be weeded out based on their understanding of more advanced material. Plus people who did poorly in that in topic in High school aren't as likely to say "I think there's money in computer's so I'll computer science." Plus if people take it in high school and decide THEN that it's not for them, it's better than them wasting their money to PAY a college to figure that out. The result is that people who take the degree are more likely to succeed and be there for the RIGHT reasons. (i.e. It's what they REALLY want to do. And that's REALLY the key to being good at anything.) Programming is like anything else, the more practice and genuine interest you have the better you get. If you start them later, they get less practice. The earlier give them the opportunity to start, the more practice they will get. All other things equal, the more practice the better the programmer.

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  • How extensible should code actually be?

    - by griegs
    I've just started a new job and one of the things my new boss talked to me about was code longevity. I've always coded to make my code infinently extensible and adaptable. I figured that if someone was going to change my code in the future then it should be easy to do. But I never really had a clear idea on how far into the future that should be. So my new boss told me not to bother coding for anything more that 3 years into the future and his reasoning was that technology changes, programs expire etc. At first I was kinda taken aback and thought he was a whack job but the longer I think about it the more I'm warming to the concept. Does anyone else have an opinion on how far into the future you should code to?

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  • What should be done first: Code reviews or Unit tests?

    - by goldenmean
    Hello, If a developer implements code for some module and wants to get it reviewed. What should be the order : *First unit test the module after designing test cases for the module, debugging and fixing the bugs and then give the modified code for peer code review (Pros- Code to be reviewed is 'clean' to a good extent. Reduces some avoidable review comments and rework. Cons- Developer might spend large time debugging/fixing a bug which could have pointed/anticipated in peer code reviews) Or *First do the code review with peers and then go for unit testing. What are your thoughts/experience on this? I believe this approach for unit testing, code reviewing should be programming language agnostic, but it would be interesting to know otherwise(if applicable) with specific examples. -AD

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  • How to stay motivated on the job?

    - by Fred Basset
    Hi All, I've been working as an engineer professionally for 15 years for a number of different companies. My question is how do you stay motivated at work? I can generally be easily motivated if I'm working on design, but that seems to be about 5% of my actual work hours. Most of my work seems to end up being fixing problems in existing poorly designed projects. I'd love to hear some feedback from the other members out there. Thank you, Fred

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  • What's the best Scala build system?

    - by gatoatigrado
    I've seen questions about IDE's here -- Which is the best IDE for Scala development? and What is the current state of tooling for Scala?, but I've had mixed experiences with IDEs. Right now, I'm using the Eclipse IDE with the automatic workspace refresh option, and KDE 4's Kate as my text editor. Here are some of the problems I'd like to solve: use my own editor IDEs are really geared at everyone using their components. I like Kate better, but the refresh system is very annoying (it doesn't use inotify, rather, maybe a 10s polling interval). The reason I don't use the built-in text editor is because broken auto-complete functionalities cause the IDE to hang for maybe 10s. rebuild only modified files The Eclipse build system is broken. It doesn't know when to rebuild classes. I find myself almost half of the time going to project-clean. Worse, it seems even after it has finished building my project, a few minutes later it will pop up with some bizarre error (edit - these errors appear to be things that were previously solved with a project clean, but then come back up...). Finally, setting "Preferences / Continue launch if project contains errors" to "prompt" seems to have no effect for Scala projects (i.e. it always launches even if there are errors). build customization I can use the "nightly" release, but I'll want to modify and use my own Scala builds, not the compiler that's built into the IDE's plugin. It would also be nice to pass [e.g.] -Xprint:jvm to the compiler (to print out lowered code). fast compiling Though Eclipse doesn't always build right, it does seem snappy -- even more so than fsc. I looked at Ant and Maven, though haven't employed either yet (I'll also need to spend time solving #3 and #4). I wanted to see if anyone has other suggestions before I spend time getting a suboptimal build system working. Thanks in advance! UPDATE - I'm now using Maven, passing a project as a compiler plugin to it. It seems fast enough; I'm not sure what kind of jar caching Maven does. A current repository for Scala 2.8.0 is available [link]. The archetypes are very cool, and cross-platform support seems very good. However, about compile issues, I'm not sure if fsc is actually fixed, or my project is stable enough (e.g. class names aren't changing) -- running it manually doesn't bother me as much. If you'd like to see an example, feel free to browse the pom.xml files I'm using [github]. UPDATE 2 - from benchmarks I've seen, Daniel Spiewak is right that buildr's faster than Maven (and, if one is doing incremental changes, Maven's 10 second latency gets annoying), so if one can craft a compatible build file, then it's probably worth it...

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  • Specification, modeling and programming are principially the same, right?

    - by Gabriel Šcerbák
    In formal specifications based on abstract algebraic types and equational theory you use formulas of equational theory to specify theory. System which will satisfy those constraints is called in formal logic a model. Modeling is process of creating a model, which abstracts of some aspects, which are unnecessary details for a specific case. So concrete system has to adhere to created model in observed aspects. Programming is a process of creating a program which will have specific behaviour - will perform specific algorithms - and programming languages through different paradigms enable us to think in a certain specific way, which abstracts of some details, usually machine specific ones. So could we be doing all those things at the same time, because they are principially the same? Is declarative programming the nearest attempt to do that? Could we use some sort f programming languages which will be good for programming as well as for modeling and specification?

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  • Why do software engineers hate writing documentation?

    - by Stewart Johnson
    I ask because I quite enjoy it! I'm talking about design documentation and implementation notes (NOT user manuals), which are non-existent in most of the codebases I've been handed. I can understand why a developer wouldn't want to write requirements (that's the analyst's job) or the user documentation (that's a technical writer's job) but I don't get why developers hate writing design docs. I don't think I would feel as if I'd finished the job if I only wrote the code and walked away -- mainly because when I've been introduced to code-only situations I've seen how hard it is to figure out what's been done and what the software does. I would hate for people to suffer the same situation when inheriting my code. What makes you loath writing supporting documentation for your code?

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  • Is there anything as good as TOAD for Postgres (Windows)?

    - by misc090912
    Hi guys, I'm just looking for a management tool like TOAD for Postgres. Anyone used a good one? Edit - I work mostly within the data itself and the database already has a mature model/design. I use the edit windows the most (well, in TOAD for Oracle anyway.) As far as I know, Toad only exists naturally for: Oracle, MS SQL, DB2 and MySQL... --JS

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  • regular expressions: love or hate or alternatives?

    - by yamspog
    While I can see the value and usefulness of regular expressions, I also find that they are extremely complicated and difficult to create and debug. I am often at the point where I find their usefulness is offset by the difficulty in creating expressions. I am a bit astonished by the fact that there is nothing quite like them and that there hasn't been an effort to recreate them use a more verbose or less arcane syntax. so, are regular expressions here to stay? are there alternatives that are gaining traction? do other people just ignore them and write hundreds of lines of string compare functions?

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  • Hobbies/Careers that complement programming

    - by Cherian
    Do you cultivate an alternative career/hobby which complements or refreshes your primary role as a developer? If so, what is it and why? Also see these related questions: If you weren't a programmer what would you be doing How do you vent stress as a programmer? What are some exercises you do to make you a better programmer? How do you reward yourself when you've overcome a monster task

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  • Which key value store is the most promising/stable?

    - by Mike Trpcic
    I'm looking to start using a key/value store for some side projects (mostly as a learning experience), but so many have popped up in the recent past that I've got no idea where to begin. Just listing from memory, I can think of: CouchDB MongoDB Riak Redis Tokyo Cabinet Berkeley DB Cassandra MemcacheDB And I'm sure that there are more out there that have slipped through my search efforts. With all the information out there, it's hard to find solid comparisons between all of the competitors. My criteria and questions are: (Most Important) Which do you recommend, and why? Which one is the fastest? Which one is the most stable? Which one is the easiest to set up and install? Which ones have bindings for Python and/or Ruby? Edit: So far it looks like Redis is the best solution, but that's only because I've gotten one solid response (from ardsrk). I'm looking for more answers like his, because they point me in the direction of useful, quantitative information. Which Key-Value store do you use, and why? Edit 2: If anyone has experience with CouchDB, Riak, or MongoDB, I'd love to hear your experiences with them (and even more so if you can offer a comparative analysis of several of them)

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  • The future of programming, or what lies in the future in programming?

    - by prosseek
    I remember that a article that Microsoft uses formal verification to debug the Device Driver, and I also remember that Functional Programming removes much of the bug as it ensures stateless programming. And we all know about the multi-core. I beleive all of them are future direction of programming or programming language. Multi-core programming or parallel programming Software Formal Verification Functional Programming (as a mainstream?) What do you think? What will be the future of programming?

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  • Hiring my first employee

    - by Ady
    A few years ago I moved to a new job having been programming for 2 years using C#, however this new company was mainly using VB6. I made the case for .NET and won, but one of the consessions I had to make was to use VB.NET and not C# (understandable as most of the other developers were already using VB). Three years later it was time to move on, but when applying for jobs I couldn't get past the recruitment agents. I realised that when they were looking at the basic requirements (5 years experience) that they could not add 2 and 3 together to make 5. They were looking for 5 years in VB or C# not across both. Frustrated I decided to combine my skills with a designer friend and start my own company. After two years of hard graft we are now looking for our first employee (a programmer), and this question has hit me again, but now I see the employers perspective. Why take the risk of someone getting up to speed when you have thousands of applicants to choose from. So my question is this, if I define the requirements to be too narrow, I could miss the really great candidates. But if they are too broad it's going to take ages to go through them all. This will be our first 'employee' so the choice needs to be good, I can't afford to make a mistake and employ someone naff. Another option would be to choose a bright university graduate, and train them up (less of a risk because we can pay them less). What have others done in this situation, and what would you recommend I do?

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  • Full Time Employee versus Contract Work?

    - by Elijah Manor
    What types of programmers tend to be attracted to full-time positions and what types are drawn to contract positions? Which type are you, and have you swapped between one to another? Does there come a time in a programmer's life when he/she typically switches from one to another? Do you find one more challenging than the other?

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  • Looking for Bugtracker with specific features

    - by Thorsten Dittmar
    Hi, we're looking into bugtracking systems at our firm. We're quite small (4 developers only). On the other hand we have quite a large number of customers we develop individual software for. Most software is built explicitly for one customer, apart from two or three standard tools we ship. To make support easier for us (and to avoid being interrupted by phone calls all the time) we're looking for a bugtracker that must support a specific set of features. We want the customers to report bugs/feature/change requests themselves and be notified about these reports by email. Then we'd like to track what we've done and how much time it took, notifying the customer about that per email (private notes for just us must be possible). At the end of the month we'd like to bill all closed reports according to the time it took to solve/implement them. The following must be possible: It must have a web based interface where the users must log in with credentials we provide. The users must not be able to create accounts themselves/we must be able to turn off such a feature. We must be able to configure projects and assign customer logins to these projects. The customers must only see projects they are assigned to, not any other projects. Also, customers must not "see" other customers. We would name the projects, so that standard tools are listed as separate projects for each customer. A monthly report must be available that we can use to get information about the requests we worked on per customer. I'd like to introduce some standard product like Mantis (I've played with that a little, but didn't quite figure out whether it provides all the features I listed above). The product should be Open Source and work on a XAMPP Windows Server 2003 environment. Does anybody have any good suggestions?

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  • What's your preferred pointer declaration style, and why?

    - by Owen
    I know this is about as bad as it gets for "religious" issues, as Jeff calls them. But I want to know why the people who disagree with me on this do so, and hear their justification for their horrific style. I googled for a while and couldn't find a style guide talking about this. So here's how I feel pointers (and references) should be declared: int* pointer = NULL; int& ref = *pointer; int*& pointer_ref = pointer; The asterisk or ampersand goes with the type, because it modifies the type of the variable being declared. EDIT: I hate to keep repeating the word, but when I say it modifies the type I'm speaking semantically. "int* something;" would translate into English as something like "I declare something, which is a pointer to an integer." The "pointer" goes along with the "integer" much more so than it does with the "something." In contrast, the other uses of the ampersand and asterisk, as address-of and dereferencing operators, act on a variable. Here are the other two styles (maybe there are more but I really hope not): int *ugly_but_common; int * uglier_but_fortunately_less_common; Why? Really, why? I can never think of a case where the second is appropriate, and the first only suitable perhaps with something like: int *hag, *beast; But come now... multiple variable declarations on one line is kind of ugly form in itself already.

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  • Worst technobabble you've ever heard

    - by pookleblinky
    Following the Egregious pop culture perversion of programming, what is the most outlandishly insane technobabble you have ever heard, either in fiction or real life? Extra points to those unfortunates whose real life stories beat Hollywood. Note: feel free to sketch out what would be necessary for such gibberish to actually work.

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  • How popular is WPF as a technology?

    - by Vaibhav
    I had a discussion with some colleagues mentioning that there are not too many projects that we do which make use of WPF for creating UI for a windows application (we almost always use Windows Forms instead). Are your experiences the same - i.e. there is not too much adoption of this technology? Why do you think that is? And will we have a time when we see much more of WPF?

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  • Yet another Haskell vs. Scala question

    - by Travis Brown
    I've been using Haskell for several months, and I love it—it's gradually become my tool of choice for everything from one-off file renaming scripts to larger XML processing programs. I'm definitely still a beginner, but I'm starting to feel comfortable with the language and the basics of the theory behind it. I'm a lowly graduate student in the humanities, so I'm not under a lot of institutional or administrative pressure to use specific tools for my work. It would be convenient for me in many ways, however, to switch to Scala (or Clojure). Most of the NLP and machine learning libraries that I work with on a daily basis (and that I've written in the past) are Java-based, and the primary project I'm working for uses a Java application server. I've been mostly disappointed by my initial interactions with Scala. Many aspects of the syntax (partial application, for example) still feel clunky to me compared to Haskell, and I miss libraries like Parsec and HXT and QuickCheck. I'm familiar with the advantages of the JVM platform, so practical questions like this one don't really help me. What I'm looking for is a motivational argument for moving to Scala. What does it do (that Haskell doesn't) that's really cool? What makes it fun or challenging or life-changing? Why should I get excited about writing it?

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