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• Generalist Languages: Dying or Alive and Well?

  - by dsimcha

  Around here, it seems like there's somewhat of a consensus that generalist programming languages (that try to be good at everything, support multiple paradigms, support both very high- and very low-level programming), etc. are a bad idea, and that it's better to pick the right tool for the job and use lots of different languages. I see three major areas where this is flawed: Interfacing multiple languages is always at least a source of friction and is sometimes practically impossible. How severe a problem this is depends on how fine-grained the interfacing is. Near the boundary between the two languages, though, you're basically limited to the intersection of their features, and you have to care about things like binary interfaces that you usually wouldn't. Passing complex data structures (i.e. not just primitives and arrays of primitives) between languages is almost always a hassle. Furthermore, shifting between different syntaxes, different conventions, etc. can be confusing and annoying, though this is a fairly minor complaint. Requirements are never set in stone. I hate picking a language thinking it's the right tool for the job, then realizing that, when some new requirement surfaces, it's actually a terrible choice for that requirement. This has happened to me several times before, usually when working with languages that are very slow, very domain specific and/or has very poor concurrency/parallelism support. When you program in a language for a while, you start to build up a personal toolbox of small utility functions/classes/programs. The value of these goes drastically down if you're forced to use a different language than the one you've accumulated all this code in. What am I missing here? Why shouldn't more focus be placed on generalist languages? Are generalist languages as a category dying or alive and well?

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• Mono is frequently used to say "Yes, .NET is cross-platform". How valid is that claim?

  - by Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen

  In What would you choose for your project between .NET and Java at this point in time ? I say that I would consider the "Will you always deploy to Windows?" the single most important decision to make up front in a new web project, and if the answer is "no", I would recommend Java instead of .NET. A very common counter-argument is that "If we ever want to run on Linux/OS X/Whatever, we'll just run Mono", which is a very compelling argument on the surface, but I don't agree for several reasons. OpenJDK and all the vendor supplied JVM's have passed the official Sun TCK ensuring things work correctly. I am not aware of Mono passing a Microsoft TCK. Mono trails the .NET releases. What .NET-level is currently fully supported? Does all GUI elements (WinForms?) work correctly in Mono? Businesses may not want to depend on Open Source frameworks as the official plan B. I am aware that with the new governance of Java by Oracle, the future is unsafe, but e.g. IBM provides JDK's for many platforms, including Linux. They are just not open sourced. So, under which circumstances is Mono a valid business strategy for .NET-applications?

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• Mono is frequently used to say "Yes, .NET is cross-platform". How valid is that claim?

  - by Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen

  In What would you choose for your project between .NET and Java at this point in time? I say that I would consider the "Will you always deploy to Windows?" the single most important (EDIT: technical) decision to make up front in a new web project, and if the answer is "no", I would recommend Java instead of .NET. A very common counter-argument is that "If we ever want to run on Linux/OS X/Whatever, we'll just run Mono", which is a very compelling argument on the surface, but I don't agree for several reasons. OpenJDK and all the vendor supplied JVM's have passed the official Sun TCK ensuring things work correctly. I am not aware of Mono passing a Microsoft TCK. Mono trails the .NET releases. What .NET-level is currently fully supported? Does all GUI elements (WinForms?) work correctly in Mono? Businesses may not want to depend on Open Source frameworks as the official plan B. I am aware that with the new governance of Java by Oracle, the future is unsafe, but e.g. IBM provides JDK's for many platforms, including Linux. They are just not open sourced. So, under which circumstances is Mono a valid business strategy for .NET-applications? Edit: Mark H summarized it as: "If the claim is that "I have a windows application written in .NET, it should run on mono", then not, it's not a valid claim - but Mono has made efforts to make porting such applications simpler.".

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• Automatic Generalization

  - by Nick Harrison

  I have been interested in functional programming since college. I played around a little with LISP back then, but I have not had an opportunity since then. Now that F# ships standard with VS 2010, I figured now is my chance. So, I was reading up on it a little over the weekend when I came across a very interesting topic. F# includes a concept called "Automatic Generalization". As I understand it, the compiler will look at your method and analyze how you are using parameters. It will automatically switch to a generic parameter if it is possible based on your usage. Wow! I am looking forward to playing with this. I have long been an advocate of using the most generic types possible especially when developing library classes. Use the highest level base class that you can get away with. Use an interface instead of a specific implementation. I don't advocate passing object around, but you get the idea. Tools like resharper, fxCop, and most static code analysis tools provide guidance to help you identify when a more generalized type is possible, but this is the first time I have heard about the compiler taking matters into its own hands. I like the sound of this. We'll see if it is a good idea or not. What are your thoughts? Am I missing the mark on what Automatic Generalization does in F#? How would this work in C#? Do you see any problems with this?

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• OpenGL sprites and point size limitation

  - by Srdan

  I'm developing a simple particle system that should be able to perform on mobile devices (iOS, Andorid). My plan was to use GL_POINT_SPRITE/GL_PROGRAM_POINT_SIZE method because of it's efficiency (GL_POINTS are enough), but after some experimenting, I found myself in a trouble. Sprite size is limited (to usually 64 pixels). I'm calculating size using this formula gl_PointSize = in_point_size * some_factor / distance_to_camera to make particle sizes proportional to distance to camera. But at some point, when camera is close enough, problem with size limitation emerges and whole system starts looking unrealistic. Is there a way to avoid this problem? If no, what's alternative? I was thinking of manually generating billboard quad for each particle. Now, I have some questions about that approach. I guess minimum geometry data would be four vertices per particle and index array to make quads from these vertices (with GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP). Additionally, for each vertex I need a color and texture coordinate. I would put all that in an interleaved vertex array. But as you can see, there is much redundancy. All vertices of same particle share same color value, and four texture coordinates are same for all particles. Because of how glDrawArrays/Elements works, I see no way to optimise this. Do you know of a better approach on how to organise per-particle data? Should I use buffers or vertex arrays, or there is no difference because each time I have to update all particles' data. About particles simulation... Where to do it? On CPU or on a vertex processors? Something tells me that mobile's CPU would do it faster than it's vertex unit (at least today in 2012 :). So, any advice on how to make a simple and efficient particle system without particle size limitation, for mobile device, would be appreciated. (animation of camera passing through particles should be realistic)

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• Best solution for getting referral information in PHP

  - by absentx

  I am currently redoing some link structuring on a website. In the past we have used specific php files on the last step to direct the user to the proper place. Example: www.mysite.com/action/go-to-blue.php or www.mysite.com/action/short/go-to-red.php www.mysite.com/action/tall/go-to-red.php We are now restructuring to eliminate the /short/ or /tall/ directory. What this means is now "go-to-blue.php" will be doing some extra processing to make sure it sends the visitor to the proper place. The static method of the past was quite effective, because, well, if they left from that page we knew we had it right. Now since we are 301 redirecting action/short/go-to-red.php to just action/go-to-red.php it is quite important on "go-to-red.php" that we realize a user may have been redirected from /short/ or /tall/. So right now I am using HTTP_REFERRER and of course in my testing that works fine, but after a lot of reading it is clear that this is not a solid solution, so I was starting to brainstorm on other ways to check and make sure we get the proper referral information. If we could check HTTP_REFERRER plus some other test, I would feel confident we have a pretty good system in place to send the visitor to the right place. Some questions/comments: Could I use a session variable or a cookie to accomplish this goal? If so, would that be maintained through the 301 redirect? I don't see why it wouldn't be.. Passing the url in the url is not an option in this case.

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• Information about how much time in spent in a function, based on the input of this function

  - by olchauvin

  Is there a (quantitative) tool to measure performance of functions based on its input? So far, the tools I used to measure performance of my code, tells me how much time I spent in functions (like Jetbrain Dottrace for .Net), but I'd like to have more information about the parameters passed to the function in order to know which parameters impact the most the performance. Let's say that I have function like that: int myFunction(int myParam1, int myParam 2) { // Do and return something based on the value of myParam1 and myParam2. // The code is likely to use if, for, while, switch, etc.... } If would like a tool that would allow me to tell me how much time is spent in myFunction based on the value of myParam1 and myParam2. For example, the tool would give me a result looking like this: For "myFunction" : value | value | Number of | Average myParam1 | myParam2 | call | time ---------|----------|-----------|-------- 1 | 5 | 500 | 301 ms 2 | 5 | 250 | 1253 ms 3 | 7 | 1268 | 538 ms ... That would mean that myFunction has been call 500 times with myParam1=1 and myParam2=5, and that with those parameters, it took on average 301ms to return a value. The idea behind that is to do some statistical optimization by organizing my code such that, the blocs of codes that are the most likely to be executed are tested before the one that are less likely to be executed. To put it bluntly, if I know which values are used the most, I can reorganize the if/while/for etc.. structure of the function (and the whole program) to optimize it. I'd like to find such tools for C++, Java or.Net. Note: I am not looking for technical tips to optimize the code (like passing parameters as const, inlining functions, initializing the capacity of vectors and the like).

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• Sitecore Item Web API and Json.Net Test Drive (Part II –Strongly Typed)

  - by jonel

  In the earlier post I did related to this topic, I have talked about using Json.Net to consume the result of Sitecore Item Web API. In that post, I have used the keyword dynamic to express my intention of consuming the returned json of the API. In this article, I will create some useful classes to write our implementation of consuming the API using strongly-typed. We will start of with the Record class which will hold the top most elements the API will present us. Pretty straight forward class. It has 2 properties to hold the statuscode and the result elements. If you intend to use a different property name in your class from the json property, you can do so by passing a string literal of the json property name to the JsonProperty attribute and name your class property differently. If you look at the earlier post, you will notice that the API returns an array of items that contains all of the Sitecore content item or items and stores them under the result->items array element. To be able to map that array of items, we have to write a collection property and decorate that with the JsonProperty attribute. The JsonItem class is a simple class which will map to the corresponding item property contained in the array. If you notice, these properties are just the basic Sitecore fields. And here’s the main portion of this post that will binds them all together. And here’s the output of this code. In closing, the same result can be achieved using the dynamic keyword or defining classes to map the json propery returned by the Sitecore Item Web API. With a little bit more of coding, you can take advantage of power of strongly-typed solution. Have a good week ahead of you.

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• Rope Colliding with a Rectangle

  - by Colton

  I have my rope, and I have my rectangles. The rope is similar to the implementation found here: http://nehe.gamedev.net/tutorial/rope_physics/17006/ Now, I want to make the rope properly collide with the rectangle such that the rope will not pass through a rectangle, and wrap around the rectangle and all that good stuff. Currently, I have it set so no rope node can pass through a rect (successfully), however, this means a rope segment can still pass through a block. Ex: So the question is, what can I do to fix this? What I have tried: I create a rectangle between two nodes of a rope, calculate rotation between the nodes, and get myself a transformed rectangle. I can successfully detect a collision between rope segments and a (non-transformed) rectangle. Create a new node or pivot point around the corner of the block, and rearrange nodes to point to the corner node. Trouble is determining what corner the rope segment is passing through. And then the current rope setup goes wonky (based on verlet integration, so a sudden change in position causes the rope to wiggle like a seismograph during a magnitude 8 earth quake.) Among other issues that might be solvable, but its turning into a case by case thing, which doesn't seem right. I think the best answer here would just be a link to a tutorial (I simply can't find any, most lead to box2D or farseer, but I want to at least learn how it works before I hide behind an engine).

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• Architecture a for a central renderer rather than self-rendering

  - by The Communist Duck

  For the architectural side of rendering, there's two main ways: having each object render itself, and having a single renderer which renders everything. I'm currently aiming for the second idea, for the following reasons: The list can be sorted to only use shaders once. Else each object would have to bind the shader, because it's not sure if it's active. The objects could be sorted and grouped. Easier to swap APIs. With a few macro lines, it can be easy to swap between a DirectX renderer and an OpenGL renderer (not a reason for my project, but still a good point) Easier to manage rendering code Of course, if anyone has strong recommendations for the first method, I will listen to them. But I was wondering how make this work. First idea The renderer has a list of pointers to the renderable components of each entity, which register themselves on RenderCompoent creation. However, I'm worrying that this may end up as a lot of extra pointer weight. But I can sort the list of pointers every so often. Second idea The entire list of entities is passed to the renderer each render call. The renderer then sorts the list (each call, or maybe once?) and gets what it wants. That's a lot of passing and/or sorting, however. Other ideas ??? PROFIT Anyone got ideas? Thank you.

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• Javascript Canvas Drawing Efficiency

  - by jujumbura

  I have just recently started some experiments with game development in Javascript/HTML5, and so far it has been going pretty well. I have a simple test scene running with some basic input handling, and a hundred-ish drawImage() calls with a few transforms. This all runs great on Chrome, but unfortunately, it already chugs on Firefox. I am using a very large canvas ( 1920 x 1080 ), but it doesn't seem like I should be hitting my limit already. So on that note, I was hoping to ask a few questions: 1) What exactly is done on the CPU vs. the GPU in terms of canvas and drawImage()? I'm afraid the answer is probably "it depends on the browser", but can anybody give me some rules of thumb? I naively imagined that each drawImage call results in a textured quad on the GPU with the canvas effectively being a render target, but I'm wondering if I'm pretty far off base there... 2) I have seen posts here and there with people saying not to use the translate(), rotate(), scale() functions when drawing on the canvas. Am I adding a lot of overhead just by adding a translate() call, as opposed to passing in the x,y to drawImage()? Some people suggest using "transate3d", etc., which are CSS properties, but I'm not sure how to use them within a scene. Can they be used for animated sprites within a single canvas? 3) I have also seen a lot of posts with people mentioning that pre-building canvases and then re-using them is a lot faster than issuing all the individual draw calls again. I am guessing that my background should definitely be pre-built into a canvas, but how far should I take this? Should I maintain an individual canvas for each sprite, to cache all static image data when not animating? Thank you much for your advice!

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• How to keep background requests in sequence

  - by Jason Lewis

  I'm faced with implementing interfaces for some rather archaic systems, for handling online deposits to stored value accounts (think campus card accounts for students). Here's my dilemma: stage 1 of the process involves passing the user off to a thrid-party site for the credit card transaction, like old-school PayPal. Step two involves using a proprietary protocol for communicating with a legacy system for conducting the actual deposit. Step two requires that each transaction have a unique sequence number, and that the requests' seqnums are in order. Since we're logging each transaction in Postgres, my first thought was to take a number from a sequence in the DB, guaranteeing uniqueness. But since we're dealing with web requests that might come in near-simultaneously, and since latency with the return from the off-ste payment processor is beyond our control, there's always the chance for a race condition in the order of requests passed back to the proprietary system, and if the seqnums are out of order, the request fails silently (brilliant, right?). I thought about enqueuing the requests in Redis and using Resque workers to process them (single worker, single process, so they are processed in order), but we need to be able to give the user feedback as to whether the transaction was processed successfully, so this seems less feasible to me. I've tried to make this application handle concurrency well (as much as possible for a Ruby on Rails app), but now we're in a situation where we have to interact with a system that is designed to be single process, single threaded, and sequential. If it at least gave an "out of order" error, I could just increment (or take the next value off the sequence), but it's designed to fail silently in the event of ANY error. We are handling timeouts in a way that blocks on I/O, but since the application uses multiple workers (Unicorn), that's no guarantee. Any ideas/suggestions would be appreciated.

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• Question on business connections and page rank?

  - by Viveta

  I just want to ask this question to get a yes no answer on something that I've been wondering on lately. So regarding how there are countless numbers of sites now that use the no-follow; making it harder to get ranking for your page if your website information might be something useful and will get traffic but maybe isn't something that your business connections share content of; but I am trying to find out if the benefit to having a bunch of say "likes" to your facebook page, but all the connection to your website's content isn't passing any benefit to your main page. So are you then competing with your own website in regards to SERPs to your facebook page and that of your home page. Am I correct on this; that if you start having your facebook page doing real good as far as connections and likes (helping bump up your facebook PageRank) but if you have links on your page with certain optimized keywords, that there is no benefit to your website (other than people getting to your facebook page, and then more likely to click to your page). Hope I explained it well what I am asking. Just wanted to get a better picture of this to know what I want to focus on as far as how I'll be linking to my desired landing pages in the future.

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• Simple multi-seat

  - by Oli

  I've asked about multiseat before. The answer (for 10.04) involved doing it the proper way (eg through gdm, multiple server layouts). The problem was that gdm needs to be patched or reverted to 2.20 for multiseat. It's an ugly hack that, worse than anything, will hold up future updates. As a result, I didn't do anything. I still have a spare video card. I still have the monitor, keyboard and mouse all sitting waiting to jump into action. And I still want to be able to turn that into a simple desktop. My needs don't seem complicated. I have a second video card, a USB hub and anything connected to that USB hub that I want to be dedicated to another X server. I don't need a login screen (I'm happy hard-coding in a auto-login and I'd be happy with the user starting the X server if that's possible). This is so simple in my head that I only need two questions: How can I explicitly start an X server from the command line on an unused video adapter (by passing it whatever configuration I need to)? Can I have this new X session load a desktop environment on load? This seems like something you should be able to write in a little upstart script within 10 minutes. That would be perfect for me as then I'd have a nice start/stop control over the secondary desktop from the main desktop (that I want to leave unscathed!) I'm thinking something as simple as this for the payload: su -u other_user -c "startx -- localhost hardware-information" And use .xinitrc to load openbox or something...

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• Http handler for classic ASP application for introducing a layer between client and server

  - by JPReddy

  I've a huge classic ASP application where in thousands of users manage their company/business data. Currently this is not multi-user so that application users can create users and authorize them to access certain areas in the system. I'm thinking of writing a handler which will act as middle man between client and server and go through every request and find out who the user is and whether he is authorized to access the data he is trying to. For the moment ignore about the part how I'm going to check the authorization and all that stuff. Just want to know whether I can implement a ASP.net handler and use it as middle man for the requests coming for a asp website? I just want to read the url and see what is the page user is trying to access and what are the parameters he is passing in the url the posted data. Is this possible? I read that Asp.net handler cannot be used with asp website and I need to use isapi filter or extensions for that and that can be developed only c/c++. Can anybody through some light on this and guide me whether I'm in the right direction or not?

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• Unit testing and Test Driven Development questions

  - by Theomax

  I'm working on an ASP.NET MVC website which performs relatively complex calculations as one of its functions. This functionality was developed some time ago (before I started working on the website) and defects have occurred whereby the calculations are not being calculated properly (basically these calculations are applied to each user which has certain flags on their record etc). Note; these defects have only been observed by users thus far, and not yet investigated in code while debugging. My questions are: Because the existing unit tests all pass and therefore do not indicate that the defects that have been reported exist; does this suggest the original code that was implemented is incorrect? i.e either the requirements were incorrect and were coded accordingly or just not coded as they were supposed to be coded? If I use the TDD approach, would I disgregard the existing unit tests as they don't show there are any problems with the calculations functionality - and I start by making some failing unit tests which test/prove there are these problems occuring, and then add code to make them pass? Note; if it's simply a bug that is occurring that can be found while debugging the code, do the unit tests need to be updated since they are already passing?

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• Confusion with floats converted into ints during collision detection

  - by TheBroodian

  So in designing a 2D platformer, I decided that I should be using a Vector2 to track the world location of my world objects to retain some sub-pixel precision for slow-moving objects and other such subtle nuances, yet representing their bodies with Rectangles, because as far as collision detection and resolution is concerned, I don't need sub-pixel precision. I thought that the following line of thought would work smoothly... Vector2 wrldLocation; Point WorldLocation; Rectangle collisionRectangle; public void Update(GameTime gameTime) { Vector2 moveAmount = velocity * (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds wrldLocation += moveAmount; WorldLocation = new Point((int)wrldLocation.X, (int)wrldLocation.Y); collisionRectangle = new Rectangle(WorldLocation.X, WorldLocation.Y, genericWidth, genericHeight); } and I guess in theory it sort of works, until I try to use it in conjunction with my collision detection, which works by using Rectangle.Offset() to project where collisionRectangle would supposedly end up after applying moveAmount to it, and if a collision is found, finding the intersection and subtracting the difference between the two intersecting sides to the given moveAmount, which would theoretically give a corrected moveAmount to apply to the object's world location that would prevent it from passing through walls and such. The issue here is that Rectangle.Offset() only accepts ints, and so I'm not really receiving an accurate adjustment to moveAmount for a Vector2. If I leave out wrldLocation from my previous example, and just use WorldLocation to keep track of my object's location, everything works smoothly, but then obviously if my object is being given velocities less than 1 pixel per update, then the velocity value may as well be 0, which I feel further down the line I may regret. Does anybody have any suggestions about how I might go about resolving this?

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• Best Method of function parameter validation

  - by Aglystas

  I've been dabbling with the idea of creating my own CMS for the experience and because it would be fun to run my website off my own code base. One of the decisions I keep coming back to is how best to validate incoming parameters for functions. This is mostly in reference to simple data types since object validation would be quite a bit more complex. At first I debated creating a naming convention that would contain information about what the parameters should be, (int, string, bool, etc) then I also figured I could create options to validate against. But then in every function I still need to run some sort of parameter validation that parses the parameter name to determine what the value can be then validate against it, granted this would be handled by passing the list of parameters to function but that still needs to happen and one of my goals is to remove the parameter validation from the function itself so that you can only have the actual function code that accomplishes the intended task without the additional code for validation. Is there any good way of handling this, or is it so low level that typically parameter validation is just done at the start of the function call anyway, so I should stick with doing that.

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• Central renderer for a given scene

  - by Loggie

  When creating a central rendering system for all game objects in a given scene I am trying to work out the best way to go about passing the scene to the render system to be rendered. If I have a scene managed by an arbitrary structure, i.e., an octree, bsp trees, quad-tree, kd tree, etc. What is the best way to pass this to the render system? The obvious problem is that if simply given the root node of the structure, the render system would require an intrinsic knowledge of the structure in order to traverse the structure. My solution to this is to clip all objects outside the frustum in the scene manager and then create a list of the objects which are left and pass this simple list to the render system, be it an array, a vector, a linked list, etc. (This would be a structure required by the render system as a means to know which objects should be rendered). The list would of course attempt to minimise OpenGL state changes by grouping objects that require the same rendering operations to be performed on them. I have been thinking a lot about this and started searching various terms on here and followed any additional information/links but I have not really found a definitive answer. The case may be that there is no definitive answer but I would appreciate some advice and tips. My question is, is this a reasonable solution to the problem? Are there any improvements that I could make? Are there any caveats I should know about? Side question: Am I right in assuming that octrees, bsp trees, etc are all forms of BVH?

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• When module calling gets ugly

  - by Pete

  Has this ever happened to you? You've got a suite of well designed, single-responsibility modules, covered by unit tests. In any higher-level function you code, you are (95% of the code) simply taking output from one module and passing it as input to the next. Then, you notice this higher-level function has turned into a 100+ line script with multiple responsibilities. Here is the problem. It is difficult (impossible) to test that script. At least, it seems so. Do you agree? In my current project, all of the bugs came from this script. Further detail: each script represents a unique solution, or algorithm, formed by using different modules in different ways. Question: how can you remedy this situation? Knee-jerk answer: break the script up into single-responsibility modules. Comment on knee-jerk answer: it already is! Best answer I can come up with so far: create higher-level connector objects which "wire" modules together in particular ways (take output from one module, feed it as input to another module). Thus if our script was: FooInput fooIn = new FooInput(1, 2); FooOutput fooOutput = fooModule(fooIn); Double runtimevalue = getsomething(fooOutput.whatever); BarInput barIn = new BarInput( runtimevalue, fooOutput.someOtherValue); BarOutput barOut = barModule(BarIn); It would become with a connector: FooBarConnectionAlgo fooBarConnector = new fooBarConnector(fooModule, barModule); FooInput fooIn = new FooInput(1, 2); BarOutput barOut = fooBarConnector(fooIn); So the advantage is, besides hiding some code and making things clearer, we can test FooBarConnectionAlgo. I'm sure this situation comes up a lot. What do you do?

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• Is there any simple game that involves psychological factors?

  - by Roman

  I need to find a simple game in which several people need to interact with each other. The game should be simple for an analysis (it should be simple to describe what happens in the game, what players did). Because of the last reason, the video games are not appropriate for my purposes. I am thinking of a simple, schematic, strategic game where people can make a limited set of simple moves. Moreover, the moves of the game should be conditioned not only by a pure logic (like in chess or go). The behavior in the game should depend on psychological factors, on relations between people. In more details, I think it should be a cooperation game where people make their decisions based on mutual trust. It would be nice if players can express punishment and forgiveness in the game. Does anybody knows a game that is close to what I have described above? ADDED I need to add that I need a game where actions of players are simple and easy to formalize. Because of that I cannot use verbal games (where communication between players is important). By simple actions I understand, for example, moves on the board from one position to another one, or passing chips from one player to another one and so on.

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• Do objects maintain identity under all non-cloning conditions in PHP?

  - by Buttle Butkus

  PHP 5.5 I'm doing a bunch of passing around of objects with the assumption that they will all maintain their identities - that any changes made to their states from inside other objects' methods will continue to hold true afterwards. Am I assuming correctly? I will give my basic structure here. class builder { protected $foo_ids = array(); // set in construct protected $foo_collection; protected $bar_ids = array(); // set in construct protected $bar_collection; protected function initFoos() { $this->foo_collection = new FooCollection(); foreach($this->food_ids as $id) { $this->foo_collection->addFoo(new foo($id)); } } protected function initBars() { // same idea as initFoos } protected function wireFoosAndBars(fooCollection $foos, barCollection $bars) { // arguments are passed in using $this->foo_collection and $this->bar_collection foreach($foos as $foo_obj) { // (foo_collection implements IteratorAggregate) $bar_ids = $foo_obj->getAssociatedBarIds(); if(!empty($bar_ids) ) { $bar_collection = new barCollection(); // sub-collection to be a component of each foo foreach($bar_ids as $bar_id) { $bar_collection->addBar(new bar($bar_id)); } $foo_obj->addBarCollection($bar_collection); // now each foo_obj has a collection of bar objects, each of which is also in the main collection. Are they the same objects? } } } } What has me worried is that foreach supposedly works on a copy of its arrays. I want all the $foo and $bar objects to maintain their identities no matter which $collection object they become of a part of. Does that make sense?

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• "Programming error" exceptions - Is my approach sound?

  - by Medo42

  I am currently trying to improve my use of exceptions, and found the important distinction between exceptions that signify programming errors (e.g. someone passed null as argument, or called a method on an object after it was disposed) and those that signify a failure in the operation that is not the caller's fault (e.g. an I/O exception). As far as I understand, it makes little sense for an immediate caller to actually handle programming error exceptions, he should instead assure that the preconditions are met. Only "outer" exception handlers at task boundaries should catch them, so they can keep the system running if a task fails. In order to ensure that client code can cleanly catch "failure" exceptions without catching error exceptions by mistake, I create my own exception classes for all failure exceptions now, and document them in the methods that throw them. I would make them checked exceptions in Java. Now I have a few questions: Before, I tried to document all exceptions that a method could throw, but that sometimes creates an unwiedly list that needs to be documented in every method up the call chain until you can show that the error won't happen. Instead, I document the preconditions in the summary / parameter descriptions and don't even mention what happens if they are not met. The idea is that people should not try to catch these exceptions explicitly anyway, so there is no need to document their types. Would you agree that this is enough? Going further, do you think all preconditions even need to be documented for every method? For example, calling methods in IDisposable objects after calling Dispose is an error, but since IDisposable is such a widely used interface, can I just assume a programmer will know this? A similar case is with reference type parameters where passing null makes no conceivable sense: Should I document "non-null" anyway? IMO, documentation should only cover things that are not obvious, but I am not sure where "obvious" ends.

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• Question regarding Readability vs Processing Time

  - by Jordy

  I am creating a flowchart for a program with multiple sequential steps. Every step should be performed if the previous step is succesful. I use a c-based programming language so the lay-out would be something like this: METHOD 1: if(step_one_succeeded()) { if(step_two_succeeded()) { if(step_three_succeeded()) { //etc. etc. } } } If my program would have 15+ steps, the resulting code would be terribly unfriendly to read. So I changed my design and implemented a global errorcode that I keep passing by reference, make everything more readable. The resulting code would be something like this: METHOD 2: int _no_error = 0; step_one(_no_error); if(_no_error == 0) step_two(_no_error); if(_no_error == 0) step_three(_no_error); if(_no_error == 0) step_two(_no_error); The cyclomatic complexibility stays the same. Now let's say there are N number of steps. And let's assume that checking a condition is 1 clock long and performing a step doesn't take up time. The processing speed of Method1 can be anywhere between 1 and N. The processing speed of Method2 however is always equal to N-1. So Method1 will be faster most of the time. Which brings me to my question, is it bad practice to sacrifice time in order to make the code more readable? And why (not)?

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• Static DataTable or DataSet in a class - bad idea?

  - by Superbest

  I have several instances of a class. Each instance stores data in a common database. So, I thought "I'll make the DataTable table field static, that way every instance can just add/modify rows to its own table field, but all the data will actually be in one place!" However, apparently it's a bad idea to do use static fields, especially if it's databases: Don't Use "Static" in C#? Is this a bad idea? Will I run into problems later on if I use it? This is a small project so I can accept no testing as a compromise if that is the only drawback. The benefit of using a static database is that there can be many objects of type MyClass, but only one table they all talk to, so a static field seems to be an implementation of exactly this, while keeping syntax concise. I don't see why I shouldn't use a static field (although I wouldn't really know) but if I had to, the best alternative I can think of is creating one DataTable, and passing a reference to it when creating each instance of MyClass, perhaps as a constructor parameter. But is this really an improvement? It seems less intuitive than a static field.

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