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• What is the single most effective thing you did to improve your programming skills?

  - by Oded

  Looking back at my career and life as a programmer, there were plenty of different ways I improved my programming skills - reading code, writing code, reading books, listening to podcasts, watching screencasts and more. My question is: What is the most effective thing you have done that improved your programming skills? What would you recommend to others that want to improve? I do expect varied answers here and no single "one size fits all" answer - I would like to know what worked for different people. Edit: Wow - what great answers! Keep 'em coming people!!!

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• Is slower performance, of programming languages, really, a bad thing?

  - by Emanuil

  Here's how I see it. There's machine code and it's all that computers needs in order to run something. Computers don't care about programming languages. It doesn't matter to them whether the machine code comes from Perl, Python or PHP. Programming languages don't serve computers. They serve programmers. Some programming languages run slower than others but that's not necessarily because there is something wrong with them. In many cases, it's because they do more things that programmers would otherwise have to do (i.e. memory management) and by doing these things, they are better in what they are supposed to do - serve programmers. So, is slower performance, of programming languages, really, a bad thing?

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• I'm Sick of Web Development - What avenues are open to me ...?

  - by 5arx

  I've been working as a web developer since 1998, mostly with ASP/ASP.Net/C# but began as a Java coder (JSP mostly). Its been fun but now I'm feeling jaded and can see the need for a change. I've considered iOS/Cocoa development and Android development recently (Objective-C looks hard while I'm a former Java developer) but I'm not sure of Career opportunities being proficient in either would afford The incline of the learning curve - I just turned 40 and I know I'm not as sharp or as quick as I once was. Does anyone have any experiences/ opinions/ advice for me? Thanks.

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• Making money from a custom built interpreter?

  - by annoying_squid

  I have been making considerable progress lately on building an interpreter. I am building it from NASM assembly code (for the core engine) and C (cl.exe the Microsoft compiler for the parser). I really don't have a lot of time but I have a lot of good ideas on how to build this so it appeals to a certain niche market. I'd love to finish this but I need to face reality here ... unless I can make some good monetary return on my investment, there is not a lot of time for me to invest. So I ask the following questions to anyone out there, especially those who have experience in monetizing their programs: 1) How easy is it for a programmer to make good money from one design? (I know this is vague but it will be interesting to hear from those who have experience or know of others' experiences). 2) What are the biggest obstacles to making money from a programming design? 3) For the parser, I am using the Microsoft compiler (no IDE) I got from visual express, so will this be an issue? Will I have to pay royalties or a license fee? 4) As far as I know NASM is a 2-clause BSD licensed application. So this should allow me to use NASM for commericial development unless I am missing something? It's good to know these things before launching into the meat and potatoes of the project.

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• Smile publie un livre blanc sur la Gestion du Cycle de vie des Applications, qui dresse un tour d'horizon des concepts et apports de l'ALM

  Smile publie un livre blanc sur la Gestion du Cycle de vie des Applications qui dresse un tour d'horizon des concepts et apports de l'ALM La mise au point d'une application moderne et fiable demande l'utilisation d'un mécanisme de gestion coordonnée du cycle de développement de celle-ci, de son idée initiale à sa livraison et sa maintenance. Elle implique tous les acteurs participant de près ou de loin au projet tout en appliquant les processus propres à l'entreprise. L'ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) se positionne de nos jours comme un outil de pilotage stratégique pour l'entreprise, permettant la bonne gestion du portefeuille des projets logiciels. Assez bien impl...

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• I've been told that Exceptions should only be used in exceptional cases. How do I know if my case is exceptional?

  - by tieTYT

  My specific case here is that the user can pass in a string into the application, the application parses it and assigns it to structured objects. Sometimes the user may type in something invalid. For example, their input may describe a person but they may say their age is "apple". Correct behavior in that case is roll back the transaction and to tell the user an error occurred and they'll have to try again. There may be a requirement to report on every error we can find in the input, not just the first. In this case, I argued we should throw an exception. He disagreed, saying, "Exceptions should be exceptional: It's expected that the user may input invalid data, so this isn't an exceptional case" I didn't really know how to argue that point, because by definition of the word, he seems to be right. But, it's my understanding that this is why Exceptions were invented in the first place. It used to be you had to inspect the result to see if an error occurred. If you failed to check, bad things could happen without you noticing. Without exceptions every level of the stack needs to check the result of the methods they call and if a programmer forgets to check in one of these levels, the code could accidentally proceed and save invalid data (for example). Seems more error prone that way. Anyway, feel free to correct anything I've said here. My main question is if someone says Exceptions should be exceptional, how do I know if my case is exceptional?

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• Harmful temptations in programming

  - by gaearon

  Just curious, what kinds of temptations in programming turned out to be really harmful in your projects? Like when you really feel the urge to do something and you believe it's going to benefit the project or else you just trick yourself into believing it is, and after a week you realize you haven't solved any real problems but instead created new ones or, in the best case, pleased your inner beast with no visible impact. Personally, I find it very hard to not refactor bad code. I work with a lot of bad legacy code, and it takes some deep breaths to not touch it when I have no tests to prove my refactoring doesn't not break anything. Another demon for me in user interface, I can literally spend hours changing UI layout just because I enjoy doing it. Sometimes I tell myself I'm working on usability, but the truth is just I love moving buttons around. What are your programming demons, and how do you avoid them?

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• Is there a phrase or word to describe an algorithim or programme is complete in that given any value for its arguments there is a predictable outcome?

  - by Mrk Mnl

  Is there a phrase to describe an algorithim or programme is complete in that given any possible value for its arguments there is a predicatable outcome? i.e. all the ramifications have been considered whatever the context? A simple example would be the below function: function returns string get_item_type(int type_no) { if(type_no < 10) return "hockey stick" else if (type_no < 20) return "bulldozer" else return "unknown" } (excuse the dismal pseudo code) No matter what number is supplied all possibiblites are catered for. My question is: is there a word to fill the blank here: "get_item_type() is ______ complete" ? (The answer is not Turing Complete - that is something quite different - but I annoyingly always think of something as "Turing Complete" when I am thinking of the above).

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• How do I add English-UK thesaurus in LibreOffice?

  - by Chethan S.

  I have been trying to use English-UK thesaurus in LibreOffice but so far cannot get it to work. I have installed mythes-en-us as only it was available in repos. As suggested in some forums I searched for openoffice.org thesaurus, but again US version was available. As a result I can't enable thesaurus when I choose English UK: As instructed elsewhere I tried this: cd /usr/share/myspell/dicts sudo ln -s th_en_US_v2.dat th_en_GB_v2.dat sudo ln -s th_en_US_v2.idx th_en_GB_v2.idx Still the result is same as shown in above screenshots. What can be done now?

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• Why appending to a list in Scala should have O(n) time complexity?

  - by Jubbat

  I am learning Scala at the moment and I just read that the execution time of the append operation for a list (:+) grows linearly with the size of the list. Appending to a list seems like a pretty common operation. Why should the idiomatic way to do this be prepending the components and then reversing the list? It can't also be a design failure as implementation could be changed at any point. From my point of view, both prepending and appending should be O(1). Is there any legitimate reason for this?

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• Java dev learning Python: what concepts do I need to wrap my head around?

  - by LRE

  I've run through a few tutorials and written some small projects. I'm right in the middle of a small project now infact. All is going well enough thanks in no small part to Uncle Google (who usually points me to Stackoverflow ;-) Several times in the last few days I've found myself wondering "what am I missing?" - I feel that I'm still thinking in Java as I write in Python. This question over at StackOverflow is full of tips about what resources to read up on for learning Python, but I still feel that I'm a Java dev with a dictionary (no pun intended) to translate into Python. What I really want to do is refactor my head to be able to write Pythonic Python instead of Java disguised as Python (not that I want to loose my Java skills). So, the crux of my question is: what concepts does a Java dev really need to learn to think Pythonic? This includes anything that needs to be un-learnt. ps: I consider language syntax to not be particularly relevant to this question.

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• Why don't languages include implication as a logical operator?

  - by Maciej Piechotka

  It might be a strange question, but why there is no implication as a logical operator in many languages (Java, C, C++, Python Haskell - although as last one have user defined operators its trivial to add it)? I find logical implication much clearer to write (particularly in asserts or assert-like expressions) then negation with or: encrypt(buf, key, mode, iv = null) { assert (mode != ECB --> iv != null); assert (mode == ECB || iv != null); assert (implies(mode != ECB, iv != null)); // User-defined function }

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• How to make a queue switches from FIFO mode to priority mode?

  - by enzom83

  I would like to implement a queue capable of operating both in the FIFO mode and in the priority mode. This is a message queue, and the priority is first of all based on the message type: for example, if the messages of A type have higher priority than the messages of the B type, as a consequence all messages of A type are dequeued first, and finally the messages of B type are dequeued. Priority mode: my idea consists of using multiple queues, one for each type of message; in this way, I can manage a priority based on the message type: just take first the messages from the queue at a higher priority and progressively from lower priority queues. FIFO mode: how to handle FIFO mode using multiple queues? In other words, the user does not see multiple queues, but it uses the queue as if it were a single queue, so that the messages leave the queue in the order they arrive when the priority mode is disabled. In order to achieve this second goal I have thought to use a further queue to manage the order of arrival of the types of messages: let me explain better with the following code snippet. int NUMBER_OF_MESSAGE_TYPES = 4; int CAPACITY = 50; Queue[] internalQueues = new Queue[NUMBER_OF_MESSAGE_TYPES]; Queue<int> queueIndexes = new Queue<int>(CAPACITY); void Enqueue(object message) { int index = ... // the destination queue (ie its index) is chosen according to the type of message. internalQueues[index].Enqueue(message); queueIndexes.Enqueue(index); } object Dequeue() { if (fifo_mode_enabled) { // What is the next type that has been enqueued? int index = queueIndexes.Dequeue(); return internalQueues[index].Dequeue(); } if (priority_mode_enabled) { for(int i=0; i < NUMBER_OF_MESSAGE_TYPES; i++) { int currentQueueIndex = i; if (!internalQueues[currentQueueIndex].IsEmpty()) { object result = internalQueues[currentQueueIndex].Dequeue(); // The following statement is fundamental to a subsequent switching // from priority mode to FIFO mode: the messages that have not been // dequeued (since they had lower priority) remain in the order in // which they were queued. queueIndexes.RemoveFirstOccurrence(currentQueueIndex); return result; } } } } What do you think about this idea? Are there better or more simple implementations?

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• Preferred lambda syntax?

  - by Roger Alsing

  I'm playing around a bit with my own C like DSL grammar and would like some oppinions. I've reserved the use of "(...)" for invocations. eg: foo(1,2); My grammar supports "trailing closures" , pretty much like Ruby's blocks that can be passed as the last argument of an invocation. Currently my grammar support trailing closures like this: foo(1,2) { //parameterless closure passed as the last argument to foo } or foo(1,2) [x] { //closure with one argument (x) passed as the last argument to foo print (x); } The reason why I use [args] instead of (args) is that (args) is ambigious: foo(1,2) (x) { } There is no way in this case to tell if foo expects 3 arguments (int,int,closure(x)) or if foo expects 2 arguments and returns a closure with one argument(int,int) - closure(x) So thats pretty much the reason why I use [] as for now. I could change this to something like: foo(1,2) : (x) { } or foo(1,2) (x) -> { } So the actual question is, what do you think looks best? [...] is somewhat wrist unfriendly. let x = [a,b] { } Ideas?

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• If the model is validating the data, shouldn't it throw exceptions on bad input?

  - by Carlos Campderrós

  Reading this SO question it seems that throwing exceptions for validating user input is frowned upon. But who should validate this data? In my applications, all validations are done in the business layer, because only the class itself really knows which values are valid for each one of its properties. If I were to copy the rules for validating a property to the controller, it is possible that the validation rules change and now there are two places where the modification should be made. Is my premise that validation should be done on the business layer wrong? What I do So my code usually ends up like this: <?php class Person { private $name; private $age; public function setName($n) { $n = trim($n); if (mb_strlen($n) == 0) { throw new ValidationException("Name cannot be empty"); } $this->name = $n; } public function setAge($a) { if (!is_int($a)) { if (!ctype_digit(trim($a))) { throw new ValidationException("Age $a is not valid"); } $a = (int)$a; } if ($a < 0 || $a > 150) { throw new ValidationException("Age $a is out of bounds"); } $this->age = $a; } // other getters, setters and methods } In the controller, I just pass the input data to the model, and catch thrown exceptions to show the error(s) to the user: <?php $person = new Person(); $errors = array(); // global try for all exceptions other than ValidationException try { // validation and process (if everything ok) try { $person->setAge($_POST['age']); } catch (ValidationException $e) { $errors['age'] = $e->getMessage(); } try { $person->setName($_POST['name']); } catch (ValidationException $e) { $errors['name'] = $e->getMessage(); } ... } catch (Exception $e) { // log the error, send 500 internal server error to the client // and finish the request } if (count($errors) == 0) { // process } else { showErrorsToUser($errors); } Is this a bad methodology? Alternate method Should maybe I create methods for isValidAge($a) that return true/false and then call them from the controller? <?php class Person { private $name; private $age; public function setName($n) { $n = trim($n); if ($this->isValidName($n)) { $this->name = $n; } else { throw new Exception("Invalid name"); } } public function setAge($a) { if ($this->isValidAge($a)) { $this->age = $a; } else { throw new Exception("Invalid age"); } } public function isValidName($n) { $n = trim($n); if (mb_strlen($n) == 0) { return false; } return true; } public function isValidAge($a) { if (!is_int($a)) { if (!ctype_digit(trim($a))) { return false; } $a = (int)$a; } if ($a < 0 || $a > 150) { return false; } return true; } // other getters, setters and methods } And the controller will be basically the same, just instead of try/catch there are now if/else: <?php $person = new Person(); $errors = array(); if ($person->isValidAge($age)) { $person->setAge($age); } catch (Exception $e) { $errors['age'] = "Invalid age"; } if ($person->isValidName($name)) { $person->setName($name); } catch (Exception $e) { $errors['name'] = "Invalid name"; } ... if (count($errors) == 0) { // process } else { showErrorsToUser($errors); } So, what should I do? I'm pretty happy with my original method, and my colleagues to whom I have showed it in general have liked it. Despite this, should I change to the alternate method? Or am I doing this terribly wrong and I should look for another way?

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• Designing call center applications, what to consider.

  - by Espen Schulstad

  We have customers calling in to place orders. What sort of considerations should I make when building a call center application. Speed is a factor here. We had a powerbuilder application that was extremly fast for a trained user. We want to have the same sort of speed in our new production system. So some thoughts I've made are: Hotkeys are important. Is it faster to use a "wizard", step by step, or should I try to place everything important about the order logically on one sceen and have another screen where you do all searches, pertinent for that order?

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• How do I use an API?

  - by GRardB

  Background I have no idea how to use an API. I know that all APIs are different, but I've been doing research and I don't fully understand the documentation that comes along with them. There's a programming competition at my university in a month and a half that I want to compete in (revolved around APIs) but nobody on my team has ever used one. We're computer science majors, so we have experience programming, but we've just never been exposed to an API. I tried looking at Twitter's documentation, but I'm lost. Would anyone be able to give me some tips on how to get started? Maybe a very easy API with examples, or explaining essential things about common elements of different APIs? I don't need a full-blown tutorial on Stack Overflow; I just need to be pointed in the right direction. Update The programming languages that I'm most fluent in are C (simple text editor usually) and Java (Eclipse). In an attempt to be more specific with my question: I understand that APIs (and yes, external libraries are what I was referring to) are simply sets of functions. Question I guess what I'm trying to ask is how I would go about accessing those functions. Do I need to download specific files and include them in my programs, or do they need to be accessed remotely, etc.?

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• What is the worst programmer habit?

  - by 0x4a6f4672

  Many people get into programming because programming is fun. At least in the beginning. After some time doing it professionally, programming is no longer fun, often just hard work. Sometimes we develop bad habits along the way to make it fun again. Some bad habits of programmers are well known, for example the "I fix that in a second" habit, the "reinvent the wheel" practice or the "all code except mine is crap" attitude (which often leads to "I will re-write the entire program from scratch" syndrome). There are things which a programmer should never do. What is the worst programmer habit?

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• When should one use "out" parameters?

  - by qegal

  In Objective-C, there are several methods like initWithContentsOfFile:encoding:error: where one passes in a reference to an NSError object for the error: parameter. In this example, the value of the NSError object passed in can change based on what goes on at runtime when the method is being called and whether the body of the method was executed in a certain way successfully. In a way I think of this NSError object as sort of like a second return value from the method, and only differs from an object anObject in the statement return anObject; in that when this statement is called, execution leaves the method. So my question is, not only in the context of error handling in Objective-C, but in general, when should one use an "out" parameter in place of returning said value in a return statement?

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• Why the static data members have to be defined outside the class separately in C++ (unlike Java)?

  - by iammilind

  class A { static int foo () {} // ok static int x; // <--- needed to be defined separately in .cpp file }; I don't see a need of having A::x defined separately in a .cpp file (or same file for templates). Why can't be A::x declared and defined at the same time? Has it been forbidden for historical reasons? My main question is, will it affect any functionality if static data members were declared/defined at the same time (same as Java) ?

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• Why are slower programming languages considered worse than faster ones?

  - by Emanuil

  Here's how I see it. There's machine code and it's all that the computers needs in order to run something. The computers don't care about programming languages. It doesn't matter to them if the machine code comes from Perl, Python or PHP. Programming languages exist to serve programmers. Some programming languages run slower then others but that's not because there is something wrong with them. It's often because they do more things that otherwise programmers would do and by doing these things, they do better what they are supposed to do - serve programmers. So why are slower programming languages considered worse than faster ones?

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• How do I use an API?

  - by GRardB

  Background I have no idea how to use an API. I know that all APIs are different, but I've been doing research and I don't fully understand the documentation that comes along with them. There's a programming competition at my university in a month and a half that I want to compete in (revolved around APIs) but nobody on my team has ever used one. We're computer science majors, so we have experience programming, but we've just never been exposed to an API. I tried looking at Twitter's documentation, but I'm lost. Would anyone be able to give me some tips on how to get started? Maybe a very easy API with examples, or explaining essential things about common elements of different APIs? I don't need a full-blown tutorial on Stack Overflow; I just need to be pointed in the right direction. Update The programming languages that I'm most fluent in are C (simple text editor usually) and Java (Eclipse). In an attempt to be more specific with my question: I understand that APIs (and yes, external libraries are what I was referring to) are simply sets of functions. Question I guess what I'm trying to ask is how I would go about accessing those functions. Do I need to download specific files and include them in my programs, or do they need to be accessed remotely, etc.?

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• TDD, new tests while old ones not implemented yet

  - by liori

  I am experimenting with test-driven development, and I found that I often come to a following situation: I write tests for some functionality X. Those tests fail. While trying to implement X, I see that I need to implement some feature Y in a lower layer of my code. So... I write tests for Y. Now both tests for X and Y fail. Once I had 4 features in different layers of code being worked on at the same time, and I was losing my focus on what I am actually doing (too many tests failing at the same time). I think I could solve this by putting more effort into planning my tasks even before I start writing tests. But in some cases I didn't know that I will need to go deeper, because e.g. I didn't know the API of lower layer very well. What should I do in such cases? Does TDD have any recommendations?

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• How did we get saddled with the (hierarchical) filesystem as the basic data structure?

  - by user1936

  I'm self-taught and I don't have a CS degree. The more I've been learning about data structure, the more I wonder, in this day and age, how are we still saddled with the filesystem, with directories and files, as the basic data storage structure on the OS? I understand the simplicity of it, but it seems nowadays that there could be more options available natively. As far as I'm aware, the only project to improve the basic functionality of the filesystem was ReiserFS, where you could tell what line of a file was changed by whom, and when. For instance, if I could have native tagging for files, where I could tag images, diagrams, word-processing documents, an entire code repository, all as belonging to a single project, that would really be helpful to me. Since I'm stuck in the filesystem paradigm, I know that I could put all those into a single folder/directory, but what if they already exist in disparate directories, and they need to stay there? I know there are programs out there that can do this, but why aren't they on the filesystem? Something that would be nice to have is some kind of relational feature in the filesystem, like you get with RDBMSes. I understand that that was supposed to be part of Vista/7, but that fell off the feature list too. Sure, any program can store a binary file and have any data structure it wants in it, by why couldn't the OS offer more complex ways of storing data, beyond the simple heirarchy of the filesystem?

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• What is the program "Additional Drivers" (jockey-gtk) talking me about?

  - by Robert Vila

  The program says: "No proprietary drivers are in use on this system" But it doesn't say if it is talking about graphical drivers only or what. Then, it lists two drivers: NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version 173). NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version current) [recomended] Both have exactly the same description. What is the difference then? When I select the 1st one, it says: "This river is not activated",and there's a button to "activate" it. When I select the 2nd one, it says: "This river is activated but it is not currently in use", and the button is to "remove". So which one is in use? Why or what for should I have activated (enabled) and not in use? If it is in use it is activated? What is the difference between activate and remove? and what is the relationship between installed, activated, in use, enabled and removed, disabled, inactive and not-installed? Why can I activate the inactivated and remove (but not deactivate) the activated that is not in use? All this is very puzzling... What other drivers can I use for an Apple MacBook pro 3,1 and how? I see that there's a nouveau and I heard that there was going to be a new open source even better. > -display > description: VGA compatible controller > product: G84 [GeForce 8600M GT] > vendor: nVidia Corporation

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