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• What's the ethos of the programming profession?

  - by mac

  I am one of those people who became professional programmer by chance, rather than by choice: I moved to a country whose main language I couldn't speak, I knew how to code... and here I am a few years later. Because of this I never really gave much a thought about the ethos of being a programmer, and working as a freelance I neither had many occasions to discuss this with fellow colleagues. Among others, Dictionary.com define the word ethos as follows: The fundamental character or spirit of a culture; the underlying sentiment that informs the beliefs, customs, or practices of a group or society; dominant assumptions of a people or period. So my question is: How would you describe the ethos of being a programmer, and why would you say so? Please note that: my question is different than this and this other ones (although you might have chosen to become a programmer because of the programmer'ethos or you might think that part of the programmer ethos is about "programming being a meaningful profession"). beside the "how/what" part of the question, there is a "why" part too! :) I would appreciate if the answer could be based not only on the idealised vision of the hero-programmer, but also on real working and life experience. Thank you in advance for your time and contributions!

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• Open source framework quality [closed]

  - by Jonas Byström

  It's not hard to find snippets, components or tools/toolkits in the open source world which holds the quality bar really high. Myself I use git, python, linux, gcc, bash and a whole range of others on a daily basis, and I love them. But when it comes to bigger frameworks, which are intended for facilitating larger tasks of an application without much interference, I'm not as enthusiastic. I've tried a few commercial frameworks (game engines), which were okay, but all big open source frameworks which I've used myself, or which I have seen used in applications were decidedly worse than the commercial equivalent. But I'm not sure if my experience was typical. Where have bigger open source frameworks for facilitating larger tasks of an application been able to equal or exceed commercial frameworks, and how were they better?

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• Overloading interface buttons, what are the best practices?

  - by XMLforDummies

  Imagine you'll have always a button labeled "Continue" in the same position in your app's GUI. Would you rather make a single button instance that takes different actions depending on the current state? private State currentState = State.Step1; private ContinueButton_Click() { switch(currentState) { case State.Step1: DoThis(); currentState = State.Step2; break; case State.Step2: DoThat(); break; } } Or would you rather have something like this? public Form() { this.ContinueStep2Button.Visible = false; } private ContinueStep1Button_Click() { DoThis(); this.ContinueStep1Button.Visible = false; this.ContinueStep2Button.Visible = true; } private ContinueStep2Button_Click() { DoThat(); }

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• String patterns that can be used to filter and group files

  - by Louis Rhys

  One of our application filters files in certain directory, extract some data from it and export a document from the extracted data. The algorithm for extracting the data depends on the file, and so far we use regex to select the algorithm to be used, for example .*\.txt will be processed by algorithm A, foo[0-5]\.xml will be processed by algo B, etc. However now we need some files to be processed together. For example, in one case we need two files, foo.*\.xml and bar.*\.xml. Part of the information to be extracted exist in the foo file, and the other part in the bar file. Moreover, we need to make sure the wild card is compatible. For example, if there are 6 files foo1.xml foo23.xml bar1.xml bar9.xml bar23.xml foo4.xml I would expect foo1 and bar1 to be identified as a group, and foo23 and bar23 as another group. bar9 and foo4 has no pair, so they will not be treated. Now, since the filter is configured by user, we need to have a pattern that can express the above requirement. I don't think you can express meaning like above in standard regex. (foo|bar).*\.xml will match all 6 file above and we can't identify which file is paired for a particular file. Is there any standard pattern that can express it? Or any idea how to modify regex to support this, that can be implemented easily?

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• What are the arguments against parsing the Cthulhu way?

  - by smarmy53

  I have been assigned the task of implementing a Domain Specific Language for a tool that may become quite important for the company. The language is simple but not trivial, it already allows nested loops, string concatenation, etc. and it is practically sure that other constructs will be added as the project advances. I know by experience that writing a lexer/parser by hand -unless the grammar is trivial- is a time consuming and error prone process. So I was left with two options: a parser generator à la yacc or a combinator library like Parsec. The former was good as well but I picked the latter for various reasons, and implemented the solution in a functional language. The result is pretty spectacular to my eyes, the code is very concise, elegant and readable/fluent. I concede it may look a bit weird if you never programmed in anything other than java/c#, but then this would be true of anything not written in java/c#. At some point however, I've been literally attacked by a co-worker. After a quick glance at my screen he declared that the code is uncomprehensible and that I should not reinvent parsing but just use a stack and String.Split like everybody does. He made a lot of noise, and I could not convince him, partially because I've been taken by surprise and had no clear explanation, partially because his opinion was immutable (no pun intended). I even offered to explain him the language, but to no avail. I'm positive the discussion is going to re-surface in front of management, so I'm preparing some solid arguments. These are the first few reasons that come to my mind to avoid a String.Split-based solution: you need lot of ifs to handle special cases and things quickly spiral out of control lots of hardcoded array indexes makes maintenance painful extremely difficult to handle things like a function call as a method argument (ex. add( (add a, b), c) very difficult to provide meaningful error messages in case of syntax errors (very likely to happen) I'm all for simplicity, clarity and avoiding unnecessary smart-cryptic stuff, but I also believe it's a mistake to dumb down every part of the codebase so that even a burger flipper can understand it. It's the same argument I hear for not using interfaces, not adopting separation of concerns, copying-pasting code around, etc. A minimum of technical competence and willingness to learn is required to work on a software project after all. (I won't use this argument as it will probably sound offensive, and starting a war is not going to help anybody) What are your favorite arguments against parsing the Cthulhu way?* *of course if you can convince me he's right I'll be perfectly happy as well

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• Programming is easy, Designing is hard

  - by Rachel

  I work as Programmer and I feel if design documents are properly in place and requirements are clearly specified than programming is not that difficult but when I think in terms of Designing a Software than it gives chills to me and I think its a very difficult part. I want to develop my Design Skills so, How should I go about it ? Are there any books, blogs, websites or other approaches that SO community can suggest ? Update: By Design I meant Design of overall Application or particular problem at hand and not UI Design.

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• How do we keep dependent data structures up to date?

  - by Geo

  Suppose you have a parse tree, an abstract syntax tree, and a control flow graph, each one logically derived from the one before. In principle it is easy to construct each graph given the parse tree, but how can we manage the complexity of updating the graphs when the parse tree is modified? We know exactly how the tree has been modified, but how can the change be propagated to the other trees in a way that doesn't become difficult to manage? Naturally the dependent graph can be updated by simply reconstructing it from scratch every time the first graph changes, but then there would be no way of knowing the details of the changes in the dependent graph. I currently have four ways to attempt to solve this problem, but each one has difficulties. Nodes of the dependent tree each observe the relevant nodes of the original tree, updating themselves and the observer lists of original tree nodes as necessary. The conceptual complexity of this can become daunting. Each node of the original tree has a list of the dependent tree nodes that specifically depend upon it, and when the node changes it sets a flag on the dependent nodes to mark them as dirty, including the parents of the dependent nodes all the way down to the root. After each change we run an algorithm that is much like the algorithm for constructing the dependent graph from scratch, but it skips over any clean node and reconstructs each dirty node, keeping track of whether the reconstructed node is actually different from the dirty node. This can also get tricky. We can represent the logical connection between the original graph and the dependent graph as a data structure, like a list of constraints, perhaps designed using a declarative language. When the original graph changes we need only scan the list to discover which constraints are violated and how the dependent tree needs to change to correct the violation, all encoded as data. We can reconstruct the dependent graph from scratch as though there were no existing dependent graph, and then compare the existing graph and the new graph to discover how it has changed. I'm sure this is the easiest way because I know there are algorithms available for detecting differences, but they are all quite computationally expensive and in principle it seems unnecessary so I'm deliberately avoiding this option. What is the right way to deal with these sorts of problems? Surely there must be a design pattern that makes this whole thing almost easy. It would be nice to have a good solution for every problem of this general description. Does this class of problem have a name?

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• Data migration - dangerous or essential?

  - by MRalwasser

  The software development department of my company is facing with the problem that data migrations are considered as potentially dangerous, especially for my managers. The background is that our customers are using a large amount of data with poor quality. The reasons for this is only partially related to our software quality, but rather to the history of the data: Most of them have been migrated from predecessor systems, some bugs caused (mostly business) inconsistencies in the data records or misentries by accident on the customer's side (which our software allowed by error). The most important counter-arguments from my managers are that faulty data may turn into even worse data, the data troubles may awake some managers at the customer and some processes on the customer's side may not work anymore because their processes somewhat adapted to our system. Personally, I consider data migrations as an integral part of the software development and that data migration can been seen to data what refactoring is to code. I think that data migration is an essential for creating software that evolves. Without it, we would have to create painful software which somewhat works around a bad data structure. I am asking you: What are your thoughts to data migration, especially for the real life cases and not only from a developer's perspecticve? Do you have any arguments against my managers opinions? How does your company deal with data migrations and the difficulties caused by them? Any other interesting thoughts which belongs to this topics?

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• Pattern for a class that does only one thing

  - by Heinzi

  Let's say I have a procedure that does stuff: void doStuff(initalParams) { ... } Now I discover that "doing stuff" is quite a compex operation. The procedure becomes large, I split it up into multiple smaller procedures and soon I realize that having some kind of state would be useful while doing stuff, so that I need to pass less parameters between the small procedures. So, I factor it out into its own class: class StuffDoer { private someInternalState; public Start(initalParams) { ... } // some private helper procedures here ... } And then I call it like this: new StuffDoer().Start(initialParams); or like this: new StuffDoer(initialParams).Start(); And this is what feels wrong. When using the .NET or Java API, I always never call new SomeApiClass().Start(...);, which makes me suspect that I'm doing it wrong. Sure, I could make StuffDoer's constructor private and add a static helper method: public static DoStuff(initalParams) { new StuffDoer().Start(initialParams); } But then I'd have a class whose external interface consists of only one static method, which also feels weird. Hence my question: Is there a well-established pattern for this type of classes that have only one entry point and have no "externally recognizable" state, i.e., instance state is only required during execution of that one entry point?

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• Strategy for backwards compatibility of persistent storage

  - by Baqueta

  In my experience, trying to ensure that new versions of an application retain compatibility with data storage from previous versions can often be a painful process. What I currently do is to save a version number for each 'unit' of data (be it a file, database row/table, or whatever) and ensure that the version number gets updated each time the data changes in some way. I also create methods to convert from v1 to v2, v2 to v3, and so on. That way, if I'm at v7 and I encounter a v3 file, I can do v3-v4-v5-v6-v7. So far this approach seems to be working out well, but I haven't had to make use of it extensively yet so there may be unforseen problems. I'm also concerned that if the objects I'm loading change significantly, I'll either have to keep around old versions of the classes or face updating all my conversion methods to handle the new class definition. Is my approach sound? Are there other/better approaches I could be using? Are there any design patterns applicable to this problem?

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• What's your most controversial programming opinion?

  - by Jon Skeet

  This is definitely subjective, but I'd like to try to avoid it becoming argumentative. I think it could be an interesting question if people treat it appropriately. The idea for this question came from the comment thread from my answer to the "What are five things you hate about your favorite language?" question. I contended that classes in C# should be sealed by default - I won't put my reasoning in the question, but I might write a fuller explanation as an answer to this question. I was surprised at the heat of the discussion in the comments (25 comments currently). So, what contentious opinions do you hold? I'd rather avoid the kind of thing which ends up being pretty religious with relatively little basis (e.g. brace placing) but examples might include things like "unit testing isn't actually terribly helpful" or "public fields are okay really". The important thing (to me, anyway) is that you've got reasons behind your opinions. Please present your opinion and reasoning - I would encourage people to vote for opinions which are well-argued and interesting, whether or not you happen to agree with them.

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• Programming languages specifications ebooks

  - by Oxinabox

  In this talk Jon Skeet talks about the advantages of reading programming language specifications. I have an Ebook Reader (a Sony, one of the better ones for PDF's, though EPub is still much better). Does anyone know any sources for specifications, optimised for ebook readersm that can be downloaded? I expect someone would have gone through the effort of optimising the websites for ebook reader reading, ideally: EPUB Format (though pdf will do) Annotated (eg XML) Most specifications I find don't have obvious download links. I'm having trouble googling because everytime I seach for say: "F# Spec EPUB" or "Python Spec PDF" most of the results are for the EPUB or PDF specifications.

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• What are the basic skills a beginner JavaScript programmer should have?

  - by Sanford

  In NYC, we are working on creating a collaborative community programming environment and trying to segment out software engineers into differing buckets. At present, we are trying to define: Beginners Intermediates Advanced Experts (and/or Masters) Similar to an apprenticeship, you would need to demonstrate specific skills to achieve different levels. Right now, we have identified beginner programming skills as: Object - method, attributes, inheritance Variable - math, string, array, boolean - all are objects Basic arithmetic functions - precedence of functions String manipulation Looping - flow control Conditionals - boolean algebra This is a first attempt, and it is a challenge since we know the natural tension between programming and software engineering. How would you create such a skills-based ranking for JavaScript in this manner? For example, what would be the beginner JavaScript skills that you would need to have to advance to the intermediate training? And so on.

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• How to "back track"?

  - by esqew

  I find that I start projects and, due to my lack of experience, find that old database structures and huge blocks of code are inefficient and memory-costly. However, by the time I realize a re-design of the entire project is needed, the project has grown to such a size that it is simply too late to go back and modify the project in its current state and requires a completely new project file and the whole shebang. How should I prevent ruts such as this one, where it is too late to go back and modify the current project to fit specifications modified far down the road from the creation of the project? (Apologies in advance for confusing grammar, it's been a long day here... as you can probably tell.)

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• Projects to learn web development

  - by David McDavidson

  I'm trying to get a job as a web developer, but the great majority of jobs offers requires previous experience and a portfolio to prove you've got the required skills. Unfortunately I don't have any real experience or anything to show. The best way to learn is to try and tackle real world problems, so I'd like to know what would be some nice projects to learn stuff and that will look good in a portfolio?

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• Language Niches and Niche Libraries

  - by Roman A. Taycher

  "Everyone Knows" ... ... that c is widely used for low level programs in large part because operating system/device apis are usually in c. ... that Java is widely used for enterprise applications in large part because of enterprise libraries and ide support. ... that ruby is widely used for webapps thanks in large part because of rails and its library ecosytem But lets go into to details what are the specific niches and subniches. Especially with respect to libraries. Where might you embed lua for application scripting versus python. Where would you use Java vs C#. Which languages do different scientists use? Also which languages have libraries for these subniches? Things like bioperl/scipy/Incanter. Please no flamewars about how nice each language or environment is. This is where they used. Also no complaints about marketing/PHBs. (Manually migrated) I asked this question again after it was closed on stackoverflow.com

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• What are some concepts people should understand before programming "big" projects?

  - by Abafei

  A person new to programming may be able to make a good small program. However, when starting to work on anything bigger than a small (think 1 C source file or Python module) program, there are some general concepts which become much more important when working on "big" (think many Python modules or C files) programs; one example is modularity, another is having a set aim. Some of these may be obvious to people who went to school to learn programming; however, people like me who did not go to programming classes sometimes have to learn these things from experience, possibly creating failed projects in the meantime. ================================================== Please explain what the concept is, and why the concept becomes more important for big programs than by small programs. Please give only 1 concept per answer.

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• Updating password hashing without forcing a new password for existing users

  - by Willem

  You maintain an existing application with an established user base. Over time it is decided that the current password hashing technique is outdated and needs to be upgraded. Furthermore, for UX reasons, you don't want existing users to be forced to update their password. The whole password hashing update needs to happen behind the screen. Assume a 'simplistic' database model for users that contains: ID Email Password How does one go around to solving such a requirement? My current thoughts are: create a new hashing method in the appropriate class update the user table in the database to hold an additional password field Once a user successfully logs in using the outdated password hash, fill the second password field with the updated hash This leaves me with the problem that I cannot reasonable differentiate between users who have and those who have not updated their password hash and thus will be forced to check both. This seems horribly flawed. Furthermore this basically means that the old hashing technique could be forced to stay indefinitely until every single user has updated their password. Only at that moment could I start removing the old hashing check and remove the superfluous database field. I'm mainly looking for some design tips here, since my current 'solution' is dirty, incomplete and what not, but if actual code is required to describe a possible solution, feel free to use any language.

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• How to treat your genius team-mate [closed]

  - by Shiplu

  I am soon going to be in a team where a very talented programmer works. Everyone int the company likes him as he knows a lot of thing and does a lot of programming. The PM and the CEO likes him a lot. I am his fan as a programmer. But as a team mate? I always try to avoid him. The reason is, in the very early days of our company our CEO used to choose both of us in a same team we worked together. Then I had many terrible experiences. Most of the time he is doing others work. When team leader breaks the work load and distributes it, He used to work more than a workday everyday and also doing my own work. The result was same duplicate code. He is not working my working finishing his own, he is doing it in the middle. how do you treat such team-mates.

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• Methodology for Documenting Existing Code Base

  - by George Stocker

  I work as part of a team on an existing application that has no inline documentation, nor does it have technical documentation. As I've been working on various bug reports on the application, I've written a sort of breadcrumb trail for myself - bug numbers in various places so that the next developer can refer to that bug number to see what was going on. My question is thus: What is the most effecient method for documenting this code? Should I document as I touch the area (the virus method, if you will), or should I document from each section on its own, and not follow paths that branch out into other areas of the application? Should I insert inline comments where none previously existed (with the fear that I may end up incorrectly identifying what the code does)? What method would you use to accurately and quickly document a rather large application that has no existing inline documentation, nor inline references to external documentation?

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• What are the most important programming skills you need to improve as a team Leader or project manager?

  - by Aba Dov

  I decided to ask this question after I read the valuable answers to the great question What is the single most effective thing you did to improve your programming skills? and after attending Ad Burns "Secrets of a rock star programmer". It made me think about me and what programming skills I try to improve. I came to realize that there should be a difference in the programming skills you try to improve as developer and the programming skills you should improve as a team leader or project manager. My question is: What are the most important programming skills you need to improve as a team Leader or project manager? What would you recommend to others that want to improve?

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• Named output parameters vs return values

  - by Abyx

  Which code is better: // C++ void handle_message(...some input parameters..., bool& wasHandled) void set_some_value(int newValue, int* oldValue = nullptr) // C# void handle_message(...some input parameters..., out bool wasHandled) void set_some_value(int newValue, out int oldValue) or bool handle_message(...some input parameters...) ///< Returns -1 if message was handled //(sorry, this documentation was broken a year ago and we're too busy to fix it) int set_some_value(T newValue) // (well, it's obvious what this function returns, so I didn't write any documentation for it) The first one doesn't have and need any documentation. It's a self-documenting code. Output value clearly says what it means, and it's really hard to make a change like this: - void handle_message(Message msg, bool& wasHandled) { - wasHandled = false; - if (...) { wasHandled = true; ... + void handle_message(Message msg, int& wasHandled) { + wasHandled = -1; + if (...) { wasHandled = ...; With return values such change could be done easily /// Return true if message was handled - bool handle_message(Message msg) { + int handle_message(Message msg) { ... - return true; + return -1; Most of compilers don't (and can't) check documentation written in comments. Programmers also tend to ignore comments while editing code. So, again, the question is: if subroutine has single output value, should it be a procedure with well-named self-documenting output parameter, or should it be a function which returns an unnamed value and have a comment describing it?

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• Finding most Important Node(s) in a Directed Graph

  - by Srikar Appal

  I have a large (˜ 20 million nodes) directed Graph with in-edges & out-edges. I want to figure out which parts of of the graph deserve the most attention. Often most of the graph is boring, or at least it is already well understood. The way I am defining "attention" is by the concept of "connectedness" i.e. How can i find the most connected node(s) in the graph? In what follows, One can assume that nodes by themselves have no score, the edges have no weight & they are either connected or not. This website suggest some pretty complicated procedures like n-dimensional space, Eigen Vectors, graph centrality concepts, pageRank etc. Is this problem that complex? Can I not do a simple Breadth-First Traversal of the entire graph where at each node I figure out a way to find the number of in-edges. The node with most in-edges is the most important node in the graph. Am I missing something here?

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• Reaching Intermediate Programming Status

  - by George Stocker

  I am a software engineer that's had positions programming in VBA (though I dare not consider that 'real' experience, as it was trial and error!), Perl w/ CGI, C#, and ASP.NET. The latter two are post-undergraduate, with my entrance into the 'real world'. I'm 2 years out of college, and have had 5 years of experience (total) across the languages I've mentioned. However, when it comes to my resume, I can only put 2 years down for C#, and less than a year down for ASP.NET. I feel like I know C#, but I still have to spend time going 'What does this method do?', whereas some of the more senior level engineers can immediately say, "Oh, Method X does this, without ever having looked at that method before." So I know empirically that there's a gulf there, but I'm not exactly sure how to bridge it. I've started programming in Project Euler, and I picked up a book on design patterns, but I still feel like I spend each day treading water, instead of moving forward. That isn't to say that I don't feel like I've made progress, it just means that as far as I come each day, I still see the mountain top way off in the distance. My question is this: How did you overcome this plateau? How long did it take you? What methods can you suggest to assist me in this? I've read through Code Complete, The Mythical Man Month, and CLR via C#, 2nd edition -- my question is: What do I do now? Edit: I just found this question on projects for an intermediate level programmer. I think it adds to the discussion (though it does not supplant my question). As such, I'm adding it to the question as a "For More Information".

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• Randomly generate directed graph on a grid

  - by Talon876

  I am trying to randomly generate a directed graph for the purpose of making a puzzle game similar to the ice sliding puzzles from Pokemon. This is essentially what I want to be able to randomly generate: http://bulbanews.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Crunching_the_numbers:_Graph_theory. I need to be able to limit the size of the graph in an x and y dimension. In the example given in the link, it would be restricted to an 8x4 grid. The problem I am running into is not randomly generating the graph, but randomly generating a graph, which I can properly map out in a 2d space, since I need something (like a rock) on the opposite side of a node, to make it visually make sense when you stop sliding. The problem with this is that sometimes the rock ends up in the path between two other nodes or possibly on another node itself, which causes the entire graph to become broken. After discussing the problem with a few people I know, we came to a couple of conclusions that may lead to a solution. Including the obstacles in the grid as part of the graph when constructing it. Start out with a fully filled grid and just draw a random path and delete out blocks that will make that path work. The problem then becomes figuring out which ones to delete to avoid introducing an additional, shorter path. We were also thinking a dynamic programming algorithm may be beneficial, though none of us are too skilled with creating dynamic programming algorithms from nothing. Any ideas or references about what this problem is officially called (if it's an official graph problem) would be most helpful. Here are some examples of what I have accomplished so far by just randomly placing blocks and generating the navigation graph from the chosen start/finish. The idea (as described in the previous link) is you start at the green S and want to get to the green F. You do this by moving up/down/left/right and you continue moving in the direction chosen until you hit a wall. In these pictures, grey is a wall, white is the floor, and the purple line is the minimum length from start to finish, and the black lines and grey dots represented possible paths. Here are some bad examples of randomly generated graphs: http://i.stack.imgur.com/9uaM6.png Here are some good examples of randomly generated (or hand tweaked) graphs: i.stack.imgur.com/uUGeL.png (can't post another link, sorry) I've also seemed to notice the more challenging ones when actually playing this as a puzzle are ones which have lots of high degree nodes along the minimum path.

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