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  • How do you coordinate with interaction designers during implementation?

    - by Alex Feinman
    Programmers are largely responsible for helping move a product from design to implementation. This process is always full of snags: implementation details rear their ugly head and make parts of the design infeasible user feedback on early prototypes leads to changes in the design new technologies alter the field of what is possible, bringing back designs previously thought impossible priorities shift, schedules change, and requirements wander How do you keep design and implementation in contact during the implementation? What processes do you use? Tools? Artifacts? Guidelines? Communication strategies?

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  • Hard Copies VS Soft Copies

    - by Garet Claborn
    Where do you draw the line and say, "OK, I'm actually going to print out this piece of code, spec, formula, or other info and carry it around but these pieces can stay on disk." Well, more importantly why do you draw the line there? I've encountered this a number of times and have some sort of vague conceptions beyond "oh now I'm REALLY stuck, better print this out." I've also found some quicksheets of basic specs to be handy. Really though, I have no particular logic behind what is useful to physically have available in the design and development process. I have a great pile of 'stuff' papers that seemed at least partially relevant at the time, but I only really use about a third of them ever and often end up wishing I had different info on hand. Edit: So this is what I'm hearing in a nutshell: Major parts of the design pattern Common, fairly static and prominently useful code (reference or specs) Some representation of data useful in collaborating or sharing with team Extreme cases of tough problem solving Overwhelmingly,almost never print anything.

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  • Is agile about development or management?

    - by ashy_32bit
    On a debate over what Scrum is all about, I found that perhaps I totally misunderstood the agile thing. It appears to me that Scrum (which is certainly considered an Agile process) is all about managing features and sprints and roles and stuff with nothing to do with TDD, pair programming, CI, refactoring and other developer centric techniques and practices that I though (until now) are the heart of agile. Now I am facing a difficulty ! 1) Is Scrum agnostic to whether developers do agile practices? 2) Can you implement Scrum in a team that does not utilize automated tests? does not perform refactoring or does not adhere to the agile programming practices?

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  • What software development model has worked best for software teams with heavy dependancy on hardware teams?

    - by MasterDIB
    So, let me explain more. There are a number of competing best practices for software development. I can find that many teams have benefited from Agile practices in some cases. In some other cases, using the Unified Process has been championed by large companies like IBM. The common themes that I find seemed to work well for teams that mainly develop software. I am interested to know what has worked best for people who have worked in shops where there is a team on the other side that produce the hardware that your software is running on. For example, one team puts together a crate with several custom hardware on it; while you need to develop the software that would run on those crates. I can't find a development model (agile, spiral ...) that works best in this case. Any wisdom is this area will be well appreciated.

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  • Looking for the better way to combine deep architecture refactoring with feature based development

    - by voroninp
    Problem statement: Given: TFS as Source Control Heavy desktop client application with tons of legacy code with bad or almost absent architecture design. Clients constantly requiring new features with sound quality, fast delivery and constantly complaining on user unfriendly UI. Problem: Application undoubtedly requires deep refactoring. This process inevitably makes application unstable and dedicated stabilization phase is needed. We've tried: Refactoring in master with periodical merges from master (MB) to feature branch (FB). (my mistake) Result: Many unstable branches. What we are advised: Create additional branch for refactoring (RB) periodically synchronizing it with MB via merge from MB to RB. After RB is stabilized we substitute master with RB and create new branch for further refactoring. This is the plan. But here I expect the real hell of merging MB to RB after merging any FB to MB. The main advantage: Stable master most of the time. Are there any better alternatives to the procees?

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  • Is ubuntu-geoip (GeoClue) is used for tracking?

    - by tijybba
    I am happily learning Ubuntu more closely now. I came across the process ubuntu-geoip-provider in system monitor. Is is used for tracking or for gathering nearest server info, or for syncing time with Internet, or perhaps for all these things? I searched for it but not enough information came through. If it is tracking, what kind of info it is gathering, and why it is doing that? It is based here: /usr/lib/ubuntu-geoip I just wanted more detailed information for that. Also, can this be disabled? Is disabling recommended, or would doing so cause dependency-related (or other) problems?

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  • Is there a limit on the number of threads that can be spawned simultaneously?

    - by georgesl
    Yesterday I came across this question: How can i call robocopy within a python script to bulk copy multiple folders?, and I though it might be a good exercise for multithreading. I though of spawning as many threads as files needed to be copied, each routine having an exception handling system to prevent the whole copying process from crashing (and log -using mutex on the log file - if there was an error). My question: Is there a limit on the number of thread you can spawn almost simultaneously? If yes, what is the limiting factor? My question is focused on PC desktop, but I welcome any answer on different hardware (embedded systems, calculus clusters, etc.).

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  • Improve Bad testing

    - by SetiSeeker
    We have a large team of developers and testers. The ratio is one tester for every one developer. We have full bug tracking and reporting systems in place. We have test plans in place. Every change to the product, the testing team is involved in the design of the feature and are included in the development process as much as possible. We build in small iterative blocks, using scrum methodology and every scrum they are included in, including the grooming sessions etc. But every release of the product, they miss even the most simple and obvious defects. How can we improve this?

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  • Can aptitude for learning Programming paradigms be influenced by culture or native language's gramma

    - by DVK
    It is well known that different people have different aptitudes regarding various programming paradigms (e.g. some people have trouble learning non-procedural, especially functional languages. Some people have trouble understanding pointers - see Joel Spolsky's blog for musings on that. Some people have trouble grasping recursion). I was recently reading about a study that looked at how the grammar of someone's native language affected their speed of learning math. Can't find that article now but a quick googling found this reference. That led me to wondering whether someone's native culture or first language might affect their aptitude towards various programming paradigms. I'm more curious about positive influences - e.g. some trait that make it easier/faster for someone to learn a particular paradigm, for example native language grammar being very recursion-oriented. To be clear, I'm looking for how culture/language grammare may affect the difference between aptitude of the same person towards various paradigms as opposed to how it affects overall aptitude towards programming between different persons. Important: the only answers I'm interested in are either references to scientific studies, or personal observations from someone intimately familiar with a particular culture/language, including from their own experience. E.g. I'm not interested in your opinion of how Chinese being your first language affects anything unless you speak Chinese or worked with extremely large set of Chinese-native programmers extensively. I'm OK with your guesstimates not based on scientific studies, but please be sure to supply your reasoning about plausible causes of your observation. I'm not interested in culture-bashing (any such commends will be deleted or flagged for deletion). I'm also not particularly interested in culture-building - we all know Linus is from Finland and Tetris was written in Russia and Larry Wall is an American. Any culture/nation can produce a brilliant mind in any discipline. I'm interested in averages.

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  • Coding a parser for a domain specific language in Java

    - by Bruno Rothgiesser
    We want to design a simple domain specific language for writing test scripts to automatically test a XML-based interface of one of our applications. A sample test would be: Get an input XML file from network shared folder or subversion repository Import the XML file using the interface Check if the import result message was successfull Export the XML corresponding to the object that was just imported using the interface and check if it correct. If the domain specific language can be declarative and its statements look as close as my sentences in the sample above as possible, it will be awesome because people won't necessarily have to be programmers to understand/write/maintain the tests. Something like: newObject = GET FILE "http://svn/repos/template1.xml" reponseMessage = IMPORT newObject newObjectID = GET PROPERTY '/object/id/' FROM responseMessage (..) But then I'm not sure how to implement a simple parser for that languange in Java. Back in school, 10 years ago, I coded a language parser using Lex and Yacc for the C language. Maybe an approach would be to use some equivalent for Java? Or, I could give up the idea of having a declarative language and choose an XML-based language instead, which would possibly be easier to create a parser for? What approach would you recommend?

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  • Moses v1.0 multi language ini file

    - by Milan Kocic
    I was working with mosesserver 0.91 and everything works fine but now there is version 1.0 and nothing is same as before. Here is my situation: I want to have multi language translation from arabic to english and from english to arabic. All data and configuration file I have works with 0.91 version of mosesserver. Here is my config file: ------------------------------------------------- ######################### ### MOSES CONFIG FILE ### ######################### # D - decoding path, R - reordering model, L - language model [translation-systems] ar-en D 0 R 0 L 0 en-ar D 1 R 1 L 1 # input factors [input-factors] 0 # mapping steps [mapping] 0 T 0 1 T 1 # translation tables: table type (hierarchical(0), textual (0), binary (1)), source-factors, target-factors, number of scores, file # OLD FORMAT is still handled for back-compatibility # OLD FORMAT translation tables: source-factors, target-factors, number of scores, file # OLD FORMAT a binary table type (1) is assumed [ttable-file] 1 0 0 5 /mnt/models/ar-en/phrase-table/phrase-table 1 0 0 5 /mnt/models/en-ar/phrase-table/phrase-table # no generation models, no generation-file section # language models: type(srilm/irstlm), factors, order, file [lmodel-file] 1 0 5 /mnt/models/ar-en/language-model/en.qblm.mm 1 0 5 /mnt/models/en-ar/language-model/ar.lm.d1.blm.mm # limit on how many phrase translations e for each phrase f are loaded # 0 = all elements loaded [ttable-limit] 20 # distortion (reordering) files [distortion-file] 0-0 wbe-msd-bidirectional-fe-allff 6 /mnt/models/ar-en/reordering-table/reordering-table.wbe-msd-bidirectional-fe.gz 0-0 wbe-msd-bidirectional-fe-allff 6 /mnt/models/en-ar/reordering-model/reordering-table.wbe-msd-bidirectional-fe.gz # distortion (reordering) weight [weight-d] 0.3 0.3 # lexicalised distortion weights [weight-lr] 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 # language model weights [weight-l] 0.5000 0.5000 # translation model weights [weight-t] 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.2 # no generation models, no weight-generation section # word penalty [weight-w] -1 -1 [distortion-limit] 12 --------------------------------------------------------- So please can someone help me and rewrite this config file so it can work in version 1.0. And i need some python sample code of translation. I am using xmlrpc in python and earler I sent http request with: import xmlrpclib client = xmlrpclib.ServerProxy('http://localhost:8080') client.translate({'text': 'some text', 'system': 'en-ar'}) but now seems there is no more 'system' parameter and moses use always default settings.

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  • Grails - Language prefix in url mappings

    - by Art79
    Hi there im having problem with language mappings. The way i want it to work is that language is encoded in the url like /appname/de/mycontroller/whatever If you go to /appname/mycontroller/action it should check your session and if there is no session pick language based on browser preference and redirect to the language prefixed site. If you have session then it will display english. English does not have en prefix (to make it harder). So i created mappings like this: class UrlMappings { static mappings = { "/$lang/$controller/$action?/$id?"{ constraints { lang(matches:/pl|en/) } } "/$lang/store/$category" { controller = "storeItem" action = "index" constraints { lang(matches:/pl|en/) } } "/$lang/store" { controller = "storeItem" action = "index" constraints { lang(matches:/pl|en/) } } "/$controller/$action?/$id?"{ lang="en" constraints { } } "/store/$category" { lang="en" controller = "storeItem" action = "index" } "/store" { lang="en" controller = "storeItem" action = "index" } "/"(view:"/index") "500"(view:'/error') } } Its not fully working and langs are hardcoded just for now. I think i did something wrong. Some of the reverse mappings work but some dont add language. If i use link tag and pass params:[lang:'pl'] then it works but if i add params:[lang:'pl', page:2] then it does not. In the second case both lang and page number become parameters in the query string. What is worse they dont affect the locale so page shows in english. Can anyone please point me to the documentation what are the rules of reverse mappings or even better how to implement such language prefix in a good way ? THANKS

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  • How should I start with Lisp?

    - by Gary Rowe
    I've been programming for years now, working my way through various iterations of Blub (BASIC, Assembler, C, C++, Visual Basic, Java, Ruby in no particular order of "Blub-ness") and I'd like to learn Lisp. However, I have a lot of intertia what with limited time (family, full time job etc) and a comfortable happiness with my current Blub (Java). So my question is this, given that I'm someone who would really like to learn Lisp, what would be the initial steps to get a good result that demonstrates the superiority of Lisp in web development? Maybe I'm missing the point, but that's how I would initially see the application of my Lisp knowledge. I'm thinking "use dialect A, use IDE B, follow instructions on page C, question your sanity after monads using counsellor D". I'd just like to know what people here consider to be an optimal set of values for A, B, C and perhaps D. Also some discussion on the relative merit of learning such a powerful language as opposed to, say, becoming a Rails expert. Just to add some more detail, I'll be developing on MacOS (or a Linux VM) - no Windows based approaches will be necessary, thanks. Notes for those just browsing by I'm going to keep this question open for a while so that I can offer feedback on the suggestions after I've been able to explore them. If you happen to be browsing by and feel you have something to add, please do. I would really welcome your feedback. Interesting links Assuming you're coming at Lisp from a Java background, this set of links will get you started quickly. Using Intellij's La Clojure plugin to integrate Lisp (videocast) Lisp for the Web Online version of Practical Common Lisp (c/o Frank Shearar) Land of Lisp a (+ (+ very quirky) game based) way in but makes it all so straightforward

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  • How should I start with Lisp?

    - by Gary Rowe
    I've been programming for years now, working my way through various iterations of Blub (BASIC, Assembler, C, C++, Visual Basic, Java, Ruby in no particular order of "Blub-ness") and I'd like to learn Lisp. However, I have a lot of intertia what with limited time (family, full time job etc) and a comfortable happiness with my current Blub (Java). So my question is this, given that I'm someone who would really like to learn Lisp, what would be the initial steps to get a good result that demonstrates the superiority of Lisp in web development? Maybe I'm missing the point, but that's how I would initially see the application of my Lisp knowledge. I'm thinking "use dialect A, use IDE B, follow instructions on page C, question your sanity after monads using counsellor D". I'd just like to know what people here consider to be an optimal set of values for A, B, C and perhaps D. Also some discussion on the relative merit of learning such a powerful language as opposed to, say, becoming a Rails expert. Just to add some more detail, I'll be developing on MacOS (or a Linux VM) - no Windows based approaches will be necessary, thanks. Notes for those just browsing by I'm going to keep this question open for a while so that I can offer feedback on the suggestions after I've been able to explore them. If you happen to be browsing by and feel you have something to add, please do. I would really welcome your feedback. Interesting links Assuming you're coming at Lisp from a Java background, this set of links will get you started quickly. Using Intellij's La Clojure plugin to integrate Lisp (videocast) Lisp for the Web Online version of Practical Common Lisp (c/o Frank Shearar) Land of Lisp a (+ (+ very quirky) game based) way in but makes it all so straightforward

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  • Google Webmaster tools Incorrect rel-alternate-hreflang implementation warning message

    - by Noam
    I'm getting this warning msg. in Google webmaster tools Incorrect rel-alternate-hreflang implementation In particular, there seems to be a problem with missing or incorrect bi-directional linking (when page A links with hreflang to page B, there must be a link back from B to A as well). This msg. seems pretty straight forward, but when checking their example pages, I'm not finding anything wrong. I'm using alternate for translation of main site menu, titles, etc.. In each page I have this: <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://mydomain.com/page" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="jp" href="http://ja.mydomain.com/page" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="ko" href="http://ko.mydomain.com/page" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="th" href="http://th.mydomain.com/page" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="http://es.mydomain.com/page" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="pt" href="http://pt.mydomain.com/page" /> I've double checked this exists in all the 6 pages. This is the first time I've seen this msg although I've implemented this at least 6 months ago, and implementation hasn't changed. Is there any way to check a specific set of pages for these things? Am I missing something in my implementation? We're auto-redirecting people from a location to their specific language, and give them an option to manually change this. I've also just found out about the suggestion for Vary HTTP header - is that relevant and important here?

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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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  • 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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  • 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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  • An alternative to multiple inheritance when creating an abstraction layer?

    - by sebf
    In my project I am creating an abstraction layer for some APIs. The purpose of the layer is to make multi-platform easier, and also to simplify the APIs to the feature set that I need while also providing some functionality, the implementation of which will be unique to each platform. At the moment, I have implemented it by defining and abstract class, which has methods which creates objects that implement interfaces. The abstract class and these interfaces define the capabilities of my abstraction layer. The implementation of these in my layer should of course be arbitrary from the POV view of my application, but I have done it, for my first API, by creating chains of subclasses which add more specific functionality as the features of the APIs they expose become less generic. An example would probably demonstrate this better: //The interface as seen by the application interface IGenericResource { byte[] GetSomeData(); } interface ISpecificResourceOne : IGenericResource { int SomePropertyOfResourceOne {get;} } interface ISpecificResourceTwo : IGenericResource { string SomePropertyOfResourceTwo {get;} } public abstract class MyLayer { ISpecificResourceOne CreateResourceOne(); ISpecificResourceTwo CreateResourceTwo(); void UseResourceOne(ISpecificResourceOne one); void UseResourceTwo(ISpecificResourceTwo two); } //The layer as created in my library public class LowLevelResource : IGenericResource { byte[] GetSomeData() {} } public class ResourceOne : LowLevelResource, ISpecificResourceOne { int SomePropertyOfResourceOne {get{}} } public class ResourceTwo : ResourceOne, ISpecificResourceTwo { string SomePropertyOfResourceTwo {get {}} } public partial class Implementation : MyLayer { override UseResourceOne(ISpecificResourceOne one) { DoStuff((ResourceOne)one); } } As can be seen, I am essentially trying to have two inheritance chains on the same object, but of course I can't do this so I simulate the second version with interfaces. The thing is though, I don't like using interfaces for this; it seems wrong, in my mind an interface defines a contract, any class that implements that interface should be able to be used where that interface is used but here that is clearly not the case because the interfaces are being used to allow an object from the layer to masquerade as something else, without the application needing to have access to its definition. What technique would allow me to define a comprehensive, intuitive collection of objects for an abstraction layer, while their implementation remains independent? (Language is C#)

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  • Best way to go for simple online multi-player games?

    - by Mr_CryptoPrime
    I want to create a trivia game for my website. The graphic design does not have to be too fancy, probably no more advanced than a typical flash game. It needs to be secure because I want users to be able to play for real money. It also needs to run fast so users don't spend their time frustrated with game freezing. Compatibility, as with almost all online products, is key because of the large target market. I am most acquainted with Java programming, but I don't want to do it in Java if there is something much better. I am assuming I will have to utilize a variety of different languages in order for everything to come together. If someone could point out the main structure of everything so I could get a good start that would be great! 1) Language choice for simple secure online multiplayer games? 2) Perhaps use a database like MySQL, stored on a secure server for the trivia questions? 3) Free educational resources and even simpler projects to practice? Any ideas or suggestions would be helpful...Thanks!

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  • I've inherited 200K lines of spaghetti code -- what now?

    - by kmote
    I hope this isn't too general of a question; I could really use some seasoned advice. I am newly employed as the sole "SW Engineer" in a fairly small shop of scientists who have spent the last 10-20 years cobbling together a vast code base. (It was written in a virtually obsolete language: G2 -- think Pascal with graphics). The program itself is a physical model of a complex chemical processing plant; the team that wrote it have incredibly deep domain knowledge but little or no formal training in programming fundamentals. They've recently learned some hard lessons about the consequences of non-existant configuration management. Their maintenance efforts are also greatly hampered by the vast accumulation of undocumented "sludge" in the code itself. I will spare you the "politics" of the situation (there's always politics!), but suffice to say, there is not a consensus of opinion about what is needed for the path ahead. They have asked me to begin presenting to the team some of the principles of modern software development. They want me to introduce some of the industry-standard practices and strategies regarding coding conventions, lifecycle management, high-level design patterns, and source control. Frankly, it's a fairly daunting task and I'm not sure where to begin. Initially, I'm inclined to tutor them in some of the central concepts of The Pragmatic Programmer, or Fowler's Refactoring ("Code Smells", etc). I also hope to introduce a number of Agile methodologies. But ultimately, to be effective, I think I'm going to need to hone in on 5-7 core fundamentals; in other words, what are the most important principles or practices that they can realistically start implementing that will give them the most "bang for the buck". So that's my question: What would you include in your list of the most effective strategies to help straighten out the spaghetti (and prevent it in the future)?

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  • What are my choices for server side sandboxed scripting?

    - by alfa64
    I'm building a public website where users share data and scripts to run over some data. The scripts are run serverside in some sort of sandbox without other interaction this cycle: my Perl program reads from a database a User made script, adds the data to be processed into the script ( ie: a JSON document) then calls the interpreter, it returns the response( a JSON document or plain text), i save it to the database with my perl script. The script should be able to have some access to built in functions added to the scripting language by myself, but nothing more. So i've stumbled upon node.js as a javascript interpreter, and and hour or so ago with Google's V8(does v8 makes sense for this kind of thing?). CoffeeScript also came to my mind, since it looks nice and it's still Javascript. I think javascript is widespread enough and more "sandboxeable" since it doesn't have OS calls or anything remotely insecure ( i think ). by the way, i'm writing the system on Perl and Php for the front end. To improve the question: I'm choosing Javascript because i think is secure and simple enough to implement with node.js, but what other alternatives are for achieving this kind of task? Lua? Python? I just can't find information on how to run a sandboxed interpreter in a proper way.

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  • Are null references really a bad thing?

    - by Tim Goodman
    I've heard it said that the inclusion of null references in programming languages is the "billion dollar mistake". But why? Sure, they can cause NullReferenceExceptions, but so what? Any element of the language can be a source of errors if used improperly. And what's the alternative? I suppose instead of saying this: Customer c = Customer.GetByLastName("Goodman"); // returns null if not found if (c != null) { Console.WriteLine(c.FirstName + " " + c.LastName + " is awesome!"); } else { Console.WriteLine("There was no customer named Goodman. How lame!"); } You could say this: if (Customer.ExistsWithLastName("Goodman")) { Customer c = Customer.GetByLastName("Goodman") // throws error if not found Console.WriteLine(c.FirstName + " " + c.LastName + " is awesome!"); } else { Console.WriteLine("There was no customer named Goodman. How lame!"); } But how is that better? Either way, if you forget to check that the customer exists, you get an exception. I suppose that a CustomerNotFoundException is a bit easier to debug than a NullReferenceException by virtue of being more descriptive. Is that all there is to it?

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  • pass by reference or pass by value?

    - by Sven
    When learning a new programming language, one of the possible roadblocks you might encounter is the question whether the language is, by default, pass-by-value or pass-by-reference So here is my question to all of you, in your favorite language, how is it actually done? and what are the possible pitfalls? your favorite language can, of course, be anything you have ever played with: popular, obscure, esoteric, new, old ...

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