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• To what extent should code try to explain fatal exceptions?

  - by Andrzej Doyle

  I suspect that all non-trivial software is likely to experience situations where it hits an external problem it cannot work around and thus needs to fail. This might be due to bad configuration, an external server being down, disk full, etc. In these situations, especially if the software is running in non-interactive mode, I expect that all one can really do is log an error and wait for the admin to read the logs and fix the problem. If someone happens to interact with the software in the meantime, e.g. a request comes in to a server that failed to initialize properly, then perhaps an appropriate hint can be given to check the logs and maybe even the error can be echoed (depending on whether you can tell if they're a technical guy as opposed to a business user). For the moment though let's not think too hard about this part. My question is, to what extent should the software be responsible for trying to explain the meaning of the fatal error? In general, how much competence/knowledge are you allowed to presume on administrators of the software, and how much should you include troubleshooting information and potential resolution steps when logging fatal errors? Of course if there's something that's unique to the runtime context this should definitely be logged; but lets assume your software needs to talk to Active Directory via LDAP and gets back an error "[LDAP: error code 49 - 80090308: LdapErr: DSID-0C090334, comment: AcceptSecurityContext error, data 525, vece]". Is it reasonable to assume that the maintainers will be able to Google the error code and work out what it means, or should the software try to parse the error code and log that this is caused by an incorrect user DN in the LDAP config? I don't know if there is a definitive best-practices answer for this, so I'm keen to hear a variety of views.

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• What would you suggest as a high school first language?

  - by ldigas

  Edit by OA: After reading some answers I'll just update the question a little. At first I put it a little bluntly, but some of those gave me some good arguments which have to be taken into consideration while making a stand on this one. (these are mostly picked up from comments and answers below). A few things to take into account: to many pupils this is a first programming language - at this stage most of them have trouble grasping a difference between data types, variable passing, ... and whatnot, less alone pointers and similar 'low level stuff' :) they will all have to pass this to get into next grade (well, big majority of them anyway) not all of them have computers at home, not all of them are willing to learn this, less alone interested in - so the concepts have to be taught on a finite time scale in school hours (as well as practice on computers) free literature is a bonus - the teacher will make some scripts and handaways, but still ... I wouldn't like to bear the parents with the burden of buying expensive literature (also, english is not a native language here ... and although they are all learning it, their ability to read it fluently is somewhat questionable) somebody gave an argument - "a language which does not get in the way of ideas" - good one accessibility on different platforms in not expecially important at this point - although most of the suggested ones are available on win as well as linux - not many macs in this part of europe (their prices are sky high for anything but specialised usage) I will check what are the licencing issues on ms express editions about using it massively in high schools for purposes like this - if someone has any info about this, please, do not be shy with it :) A friend of mine, informatics teacher - in EU it comes as something as junior cs teacher, in a local high school asked me what I thought about what should be the first language pupils should be taught? It is a technical school (a little more oriented towards mathematics than the gymnasium, but not computer oriented totally). So I'm asking you - what do you think should be the first language pupils are exposed to in highschool? They have been teaching Pascal so far, but she's not sure that's a good course. She thought about switching to C (which I resented; considering not all pupils have interests in programming, to start with, and should be taught something higher level since they are just gripping the idea of a loop and such ... for a start), I suggested python or ruby (preferably py since it handles all paradigms). What is your opinion on this one? I looked, but didn't find a similar question on SO, so if there is one, please just point me towards it. Edit: The assumption is that none of the pupils have been exposed to any programming in junior school. See also: What is the best way to teach young kids some basic programming concepts? Best ways to teach a beginner to program How and when do you teach a kid to code What is the easiest language to start with? High School Programming

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• When I'm iterating over two arrays at once, which one do I use as the limit?

  - by Martijn Courteaux

  Hi, I'm always struggling with something like the following Java example: String breads[] = {"Brown", "White", "Sandwich"}; int count[] = new int[breads.length]; for (int i = 0; i < ****; i++) { // Prompt the number of breads } ****: which array.length should I choose? I can choose between breads.length and count.length I know it would be the same result, but I don't know which one I shoud choose. There are many other examples where I get the same problem. I'm sure that you have encountered this problem as well in the past. What should you choose? Are there general agreements? Thanks

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• In what situations is octal base used?

  - by Bob

  I've seen binary and hex used quite often but never octal. Yet octal has it's own convention for being used in some languages (ie, a leading 0 indicating octal base). When is octal used? What are some typical situations when one would use octal or octal would be easier to reason about? Or is it merely a matter of taste?

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• Throwing cats out of windows

  - by AndrewF

  Imagine you're in a tall building with a cat. The cat can survive a fall out of a low story window, but will die if thrown from a high floor. How can you figure out the longest drop that the cat can survive, using the least number of attempts? Obviously, if you only have one cat, then you can only search linearly. First throw the cat from the first floor. If it survives, throw it from the second. Eventually, after being thrown from floor f, the cat will die. You then know that floor f-1 was the maximal safe floor. But what if you have more than one cat? You can now try some sort of logarithmic search. Let's say that the build has 100 floors and you have two identical cats. If you throw the first cat out of the 50th floor and it dies, then you only have to search 50 floors linearly. You can do even better if you choose a lower floor for your first attempt. Let's say that you choose to tackle the problem 20 floors at a time and that the first fatal floor is #50. In that case, your first cat will survive flights from floors 20 and 40 before dying from floor 60. You just have to check floors 41 through 49 individually. That's a total of 12 attempts, which is much better than the 50 you would need had you attempted to use binary elimination. In general, what's the best strategy and it's worst-case complexity for an n-storied building with 2 cats? What about for n floors and m cats? Assume that all cats are equivalent: they will all survive or die from a fall from a given window. Also, every attempt is independent: if a cat survives a fall, it is completely unharmed. This isn't homework, although I may have solved it for school assignment once. It's just a whimsical problem that popped into my head today and I don't remember the solution. Bonus points if anyone knows the name of this problem or of the solution algorithm.

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• Is there a way to programatically check dependencies of an EXE?

  - by Mason Wheeler

  I've got a certain project that I build and distribute to users. I have two build configurations, Debug and Release. Debug, obviously, is for my use in debugging, but there's an additional wrinkle: the Debug configuration uses a special debugging memory manager, with a dependency on an external DLL. There's been a few times when I've accidentally built and distributed an installer package with the Debug configuration, and it's then failed to run once installed because the users don't have the special DLL. I'd like to be able to keep that from happening in the future. I know I can get the dependencies in a program by running Dependency Walker, but I'm looking for a way to do it programatically. Specifically, I have a way to run scripts while creating the installer, and I want something I can put in the installer script to check the program and see if it has a dependency on this DLL, and if so, cause the installer-creation process to fail with an error. I know how to create a simple CLI program that would take two filenames as parameters, and could run a DependsOn function and create output based on the result of it, but I don't know what to put in the DependsOn function. Does anyone know how I'd go about writing it?

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• What is the MVC equivalent of this code:

  - by Ian Boyd

  Here's the easy pseudo-code: void TextBox1Changed() { //If the text isn't a number, color it red if (!IsValidNumber(TextBox1.Text) TextBox1.Color = Pink; else TextBox1.Color = WindowColor; } What's the MVC enterprisey version?

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• Dummy SMTP Server for testing apps that send email

  - by Patrick McElhaney

  I have a lot of apps that send email. Sometimes it's one or two messages at a time. Sometimes it's thousands of messages. In development, I usually test by substituting my own address for any recipient addresses. I'm sure that's what everybody else does, until they get fed up with it and find a better solution. I was thinking about creating a dummy SMTP server that just catches the messages and dumps them in a SQLLite database, or an mbox file, or whatever. But surely such a tool already exists? How do you test sending email?

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• What is recursion? -- In plain english.

  - by Christopher Altman

  I hear this word everyday, but cannot give a meaningful, concise, or plain-english answer to what it is. Recursion is defined by the bastian of knowledge as: Recursion in computer science is a method where the solution to a problem depends on solutions to smaller instances of the same problem.1 The approach can be applied to many types of problems, and is one of the central ideas of computer science.[2] Source Is recursion simply something that repeats itself to get a solution? I am looking for a "Recursion for Dummies" definition, and maybe simple examples. My goal is to be able to understand and explain recursion in my own words. I do not like simply thinking I know the meaning of something because I hear it referenced daily, but have not paused to form my own understanding.

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• Purpose of getters and setters? [closed]

  - by wrongusername

  Possible Duplicates: Public Data members vs Getters, Setters Purpose of private members in a class What is the use of getters and setters when you can just make your variables public and avoid the hassle of such lines as A.setVariableX(A.getVariableY())?

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• Is there any self-improving compiler around?

  - by JohnIdol

  I am not aware of any self-improving compiler, but then again I am not much of a compiler-guy. Is there ANY self-improving compiler out there? Please note that I am talking about a compiler that improves itself - not a compiler that improves the code it compiles. Any pointers appreciated! Side-note: in case you're wondering why I am asking have a look at this post. Even if I agree with most of the arguments I am not too sure about the following: We have programs that can improve their code without human input now — they’re called compilers. ... hence my question.

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• How could it happen that version control software emerged so lately?

  - by sharptooth

  According to Wikipedia (the table at the page bottom), the earliest known version control systems were CVS and TeamWare both known from year 1990. How can it be? Software development has been here from at most 1960's and I honestly can't imagine working with codebase without version control. How could it happen that version control software emerged so lately compared to software development?

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• Should I capitalize my constants?

  - by Tim Merrifield

  What do you guys think? Should constants be capitalized? Or is that an archaic practice? So... const int MY_CONSTANT = 5; vs. const int myConstant = 5;

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• What turns away users/prospective users?

  - by Zach Johnson

  In your experience, what kinds of things have turned away users and prospective users from using your programs? Also, what kinds of things turn you away from using someone else's programs? For example, one thing that really bugs me is when someone provides free software, but requires you to enter your name and email address before you download it. Why do they need my name and email address? I just want to use the program! I understand that the developer(s) may want to get a feel for how many users they have, etc, but the extra work I have to do really makes me think twice about downloading their software, even if it does really great things.

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• How do game companies handle programming for multiple platforms?

  - by stormist

  You often see that a new game will be released on Xbox 360, PS3 and Windows PC. How do gaming companies do this? Is it a common source code compiled using different compilers? Are actual different source codes required? example news article announcing this: http://www.gameranx.com/updates/id/502/article/dungeon-siege-3-announced-to-be-developed-by-obsidian/

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• Is anyone aware of any HTML5 based language editor with content assist?

  - by Chris

  Does anyone know of a project that will allow the editing of a language (any language) within a web-page itself (via HTML-5) with content assist (ctrl+space)?

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• What applications is Python optimal for?

  - by Alan

  I'm already a professional J2EE developer by day, and Rails developer by night. I'm planning on adding Python to my list of skills. I'm already convinced a language is just a tool, so I'm not interested in a religious war. I agree with the Pragmatic Programmers that learning one language/year is a good thing for your professional development So, in your considered opinion, what kinds of applications does Python hit the sweet spot? And why? What advantages does it have, and why do these advantages outweigh the costs in adopting Python? ADD: I also plan on learning a pure functional language like Scheme.

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• Do You Really Know Your Programming Languages?

  - by Kristopher Johnson

  I am often amazed at how little some of my colleagues know or care about their craft. Something that constantly frustrates me is that people don't want to learn any more than they need to about the programming languages they use every day. Many programmers seem content to learn some pidgin sub-dialect, and stick with that. If they see a keyword or construct that they aren't familiar with, they'll complain that the code is "tricky." What would you think of a civil engineer who shied away from calculus because it had "all those tricky math symbols?" I'm not suggesting that we all need to become "language lawyers." But if you make your living as a programmer, and claim to be a competent user of language X, then I think at a minimum you should know the following: Do you know the keywords of the language and what they do? What are the valid syntactic forms? How are memory, files, and other operating system resources managed? Where is the official language specification and library reference for the language? The last one is the one that really gets me. Many programmers seem to have no idea that there is a "specification" or "standard" for any particular language. I still talk to people who think that Microsoft invented C++, and that if a program doesn't compile under VC6, it's not a valid C++ program. Programmers these days have it easy when it comes to obtaining specs. Newer languages like C#, Java, Python, Ruby, etc. all have their documentation available for free from the vendors' web sites. Older languages and platforms often have standards controlled by standards bodies that demand payment for specs, but even that shouldn't be a deterrent: the C++ standard is available from ISO for $30 (and why am I the only person I know who has a copy?). Programming is hard enough even when you do know the language. If you don't, I don't see how you have a chance. What do the rest of you think? Am I right, or should we all be content with the typical level of programming language expertise? Update: Several great comments here. Thanks. A couple of people hit on something that I didn't think about: What really irks me is not the lack of knowledge, but the lack of curiosity and willingness to learn. It seems some people don't have any time to hone their craft, but they have plenty of time to write lots of bad code. And I don't expect people to be able to recite a list of keywords or EBNF expressions, but I do expect that when they see some code, they should have some inkling of what it does. Few people have complete knowledge of every dark corner of their language or platform, but everyone should at least know enough that when they see something unfamiliar, they will know how to get whatever additional information they need to understand it.

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• Plotting an Arc in Discrete Steps

  - by phobos51594

  Good afternoon, Background My question relates to the plotting of an arbitrary arc in space using discrete steps. It is unique, however, in that I am not drawing to a canvas in the typical sense. The firmware I am designing is for a gcode interpreter for a CNC mill that will translate commands into stepper motor movements. Now, I have already found a similar question on this very site, but the methodology suggested (Bresenham's Algorithm) appears to be incompatable for moving an object in space, as it only relies on the calculation of one octant of a circle which is then mirrored about the remaining axes of symmetry. Furthermore, the prescribed method of calculation an arc between two arbitrary angles relies on trigonometry (I am implementing on a microcontroller and would like to avoid costly trig functions, if possible) and simply not taking the steps that are out of the range. Finally, the algorithm only is designed to work in one rotational direction (e.g. counterclockwise). Question So, on to the actual question: Does anyone know of a general-purpose algorithm that can be used to "draw" an arbitrary arc in discrete steps while still giving respect to angular direction (CW / CCW)? The final implementation will be done in C, but the language for the purpose of the question is irrelevant. Thank you in advance. References S.O post on drawing a simple circle using Bresenham's Algorithm: "Drawing" an arc in discrete x-y steps Wiki page describing Bresenham's Algorithm for a circle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midpoint_circle_algorithm Gcode instructions to be implemented (see. G2 and G3) http://linuxcnc.org/docs/html/gcode.html

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• Can this rectangle to rectangle intersection code still work?

  - by Jeremy Rudd

  I was looking for a fast performing code to test if 2 rectangles are intersecting. A search on the internet came up with this one-liner (WOOT!), but I don't understand how to write it in Javascript, it seems to be written in an ancient form of C++. Can this thing still work? Can you make it work? struct { LONG left; LONG top; LONG right; LONG bottom; } RECT; bool IntersectRect(const RECT * r1, const RECT * r2) { return ! ( r2->left > r1->right || r2->right left || r2->top > r1->bottom || r2->bottom top ); }

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• Why are compilers so stupid?

  - by martinus

  I always wonder why compilers can't figure out simple things that are obvious to the human eye. They do lots of simple optimizations, but never something even a little bit complex. For example, this code takes about 6 seconds on my computer to print the value zero (using java 1.6): int x = 0; for (int i = 0; i < 100 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000; ++i) { x += x + x + x + x + x; } System.out.println(x); It is totally obvious that x is never changed so no matter how often you add 0 to itself it stays zero. So the compiler could in theory replace this with System.out.println(0). Or even better, this takes 23 seconds: public int slow() { String s = "x"; for (int i = 0; i < 100000; ++i) { s += "x"; } return 10; } First the compiler could notice that I am actually creating a string s of 100000 "x" so it could automatically use s StringBuilder instead, or even better directly replace it with the resulting string as it is always the same. Second, It does not recognize that I do not actually use the string at all, so the whole loop could be discarded! Why, after so much manpower is going into fast compilers, are they still so relatively dumb? EDIT: Of course these are stupid examples that should never be used anywhere. But whenever I have to rewrite a beautiful and very readable code into something unreadable so that the compiler is happy and produces fast code, I wonder why compilers or some other automated tool can't do this work for me.

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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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• Opinions on collision detection objects with a moving scene

  - by Evan Teran

  So my question is simple, and I guess it boils down to how anal you want to be about collision detection. To keep things simple, lets assume we're talking about 2D sprites defined by a bounding box. In addition, let's assume that my sprite object has a function to detect collisions like this: S.collidesWith(other); Finally the scene is moving and "walls" in the scene can move, an object may not touch a wall. So a simple implementation might look like this (psuedo code): moveWalls(); moveSprite(); foreach(wall as w) { if(s.collidesWith(w)) { gameover(); } } The problem with this is that if the sprite and wall move towards each other, depending on the circumstances (such as diagonal moment). They may pass though each other (unlikely but could happen). So I may do this instead. moveWalls(); foreach(wall as w) { if(s.collidesWith(w)) { gameover(); } } moveSprite(); foreach(wall as w) { if(s.collidesWith(w)) { gameover(); } } This takes care of the passing through each other issue, but another rare issue comes up. If they are adjacent to each other (literally the next pixel) and both the wall and the sprite are moving left, then I will get an invalid collision since the wall moves, checks for collision (hit) then the sprite is moved. Which seems unfair. In addition, to that, the redundant collision detection feels very inefficient. I could give the player movement priority alleviating the first issue but it is still checking twice. moveSprite(); foreach(wall as w) { if(s.collidesWith(w)) { gameover(); } } moveWalls(); foreach(wall as w) { if(s.collidesWith(w)) { gameover(); } } Am I simply over thinking this issue, should this just be chalked up to "it'll happen rare enough that no one will care"? Certainly looking at old sprite based games, I often find situations where the collision detection has subtle flaws, but I figure by now we can do better :-P. What are people's thoughts?

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• Why should GoTos be bad?

  - by lisn

  I'm using gotos and a lot of them. C++, PHP or COBOL - I use them on nearly all occasions where everybody else would use functions or even classes. Yet my code is Clear Maintainable Bug-free Fast So why does everybody I meet tell me about how bad gotos are? Are there any facts that show that they are "bad"?

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• Deal with undefined values in code or in the template?

  - by David

  I'm writing a web application (in Python, not that it matters). One of the features is that people can leave comments on things. I have a class for comments, basically like so: class Comment: user = ... # other stuff where user is an instance of another class, class User: name = ... # other stuff And of course in my template, I have <div>${comment.user.name}</div> Problem: Let's say I allow people to post comments anonymously. In that case comment.user is None (undefined), and of course accessing comment.user.name is going to raise an error. What's the best way to deal with that? I see three possibilities: Use a conditional in the template to test for that case and display something different. This is the most versatile solution, since I can change the way anonymous comments are displayed to, say, "Posted anonymously" (instead of "Posted by ..."), but I've often been told that templates should be mindless display machines and not include logic like that. Also, other people might wind up writing alternate templates for the same application, and I feel like I should be making things as easy as possible for the template writer. Implement an accessor method for the user property of a Comment that returns a dummy user object when the real user is undefined. This dummy object would have user.name = 'Anonymous' or something like that and so the template could access it and print its name with no error. Put an actual record in my database corresponding to a user with user.name = Anonymous (or something like that), and just assign that user to any comment posted when nobody's logged in. I know I've seen some real-world systems that operate this way. (phpBB?) Is there a prevailing wisdom among people who write these sorts of systems about which of these (or some other solution) is the best? Any pitfalls I should watch out for if I go one way vs. another? Whoever gives the best explanation gets the checkmark.

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