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• What language should I use for making a cross platform library?

  - by Andrei

  I want to build a SyncML parsing library (no UI) which should be able to build up messages based on information provided by the host application, fed in by the library's methods. Also, the library should to be able to do callbacks to methods in the host application. I want to be able to compile this and have it available on as many platforms as possible: Windows, Windows Phone 7 OS, OSX, iOS, Linux, Android, BlackBerry. Basically as many platforms as possible. The priority is to have this available on mobile devices. Questions: What setup should I use? (programming languages, compilers, IDE etc.) How would I compile this library for these different platforms and how would I connect to it? Any other info? e.g. articles that cover the subject of cross-platform development? I haven't done this sort of a cross-platform project before, so any available information to put me in the right direction would be welcomed. Myself, I have a background in C#/.NET and Objective-C.

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• HTML5 point and click adventure game code structure with CreateJS

  - by user1612686

  I'm a programming beginner. I made a tiny one scene point and click adventure game to try to understand simple game logic and came up with this: CreateJS features prototypes for creating bitmap images, sprites and sounds objects. I create them and define their properties in a corresponding function (for example images(); spritesheets(), sounds()...). I then create functions for each animation sequence and "game level" functions, which handle user interactions and play the according animations and sounds for a certain event (when the level is complete, the current level function calls the next level function). And I end up with quite the mess. What would be the "standard (if something like that exists)" OOP approach to structure simple game data and interactions like that? I thought about making game.images, game.sprites, game.sounds objects, which contain all the game data with its properties using CreateJS constructors. game.spriteAnimations and game.tweenAnimations objects for sprite animations and tweens and a game.levelN object, which communicates with a game.interaction object, processing user interaction. Does this make any sense? How do you structure your simple game code? Thanks in advance!

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• Is Test Driven Development viable in game development?

  - by Will Marcouiller

  As being Scrum certified, I tend to prone for Agile methodologies while developping a system, and even use some canvas from the Scrum framework to manage my day-to-day work. Besides, I am wondering whether TDD is an option in game development, if it is viable? If I believe this GD question, TDD is not much of a use in game development. Why are MVC & TDD not employed more in game architecture? I come from industrial programming where big projects with big budgets need to work flawlessly, as it could result to catastrophic scenarios if the code wasn't throroughly tested inside and out. Plus, following Scrum rules encourages meeting the due dates of your work while every single action in Scrum is time-boxed! So, I agree when in the question linked above they say to stop trying to build a system, and start writing the game. It is quite what Scrum says, try not to build the perfect system, first: make it work by the Sprint end. Then, refactor the code while working in the second Sprint if needed! I understand that if not all departments responsible for the game development use Scrum, Scrum becomes useless. But let's consider for a moment that all the departments do use Scrum... I think that TDD would be good to write bug-free code, though you do not want to write the "perfect" system/game. So my question is the following: Is TDD viable in game development anyhow?

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• First time application where to start?

  - by Nazariy

  After many years of searches and copy pasting, I'm still looking for simple solution that can transliterate text input on the fly from one key set to another. There are quite few online services that provide this feature but it still quite annoying to go online all the time. Unfortunately there is not that many applications left which are capable of doing so, and none of them supported by this day. I decided to make my own and at same time to learn something new for my self. The idea is quite simple: application should sit in system tray and wait until input language get changed, for example to Russian. If Russian language is activated, application should start to listen for user key strokes combination and replace them based on custom dictionary for example R = ?, SH = ? etc. I should be able to bind application to any installed language (Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Belarusian etc.) and customise dictionary for any of them. So my question is: Which language should I chose for this task C++, C# or might be something hardcore like Assembler, as application should work natively with Windows XP/Vista/7 or possibly Mac. (cross platform support is good but my main target is Windows) Due to nature of application behaviour how can I tell anti-virus software that it is not a "Key Logger" and basically not a virus? Where should I start and what should I be aware of? P.S. My current programming knowledge is quite basic, PHP and JavaScript with Object Oriented approach.

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• How do I implement the bg, &, and bg commands functionaliity in my custom unix shell program written in C

  - by user1631009

  I am trying to extend the functionality of my custom unix shell which I earlier wrote as part of my lab assignment. It currently supports all commands through execvp calls, in-built commands like pwd, cd, history, echo and export, and also redirection and pipes. Now I wanted to add the support for running a command in background e.g. $ls -la& Now I also want to implement bg and fg job control commands. I know this can be achieved if I execute the command by forking a new child process and not waiting for it in the parent process. But how do I again bring this command to foreground using fg? I have the idea of entering each background command in a list assigning each of them a serial number. But I don't know how do I make the processes execute in the background, then bring them back to foreground. I guess wait() and waitpid() system calls would come handy but I am not that comfortable with them. I tried reading the man pages but still am in the dark. Can someone please explain in a layman's language how to achieve this in UNIX system programming? And does it have something to do with SIGCONT and SIGSTP signals?

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• How would you refactor nested IF Statements?

  - by saunderl

  I was cruising around the programming blogosphere when I happened upon this post about GOTO's: http://giuliozambon.blogspot.com/2010/12/programmers-tabu.html Here the writer talks about how "one must come to the conclusion that there are situations where GOTOs make for more readable and more maintainable code" and then goes on to show an example similar to this: if (Check#1) { CodeBlock#1 if (Check#2) { CodeBlock#2 if (Check#3) { CodeBlock#3 if (Check#4) { CodeBlock#4 if (Check#5) { CodeBlock#5 if (Check#6) { CodeBlock#6 if (Check#7) { CodeBlock#7 } else { rest - of - the - program } } } } } } } The writer then proposes that using GOTO's would make this code much easier to read and maintain. I personally can think of at least 3 different ways to flatten it out and make this code more readable without resorting to flow-breaking GOTO's. Here are my two favorites. 1 - Nested Small Functions. Take each if and its code block and turn it into a function. If the boolean check fails, just return. If it passes, then call the next function in the chain. (Boy, that sounds a lot like recursion, could you do it in a single loop with function pointers?) 2 - Sentinal Variable. To me this is the easyest. Just use a blnContinueProcessing variable and check to see if it is still true in your if check. Then if the check fails, set the variable to false. How many different ways can this type of coding problem be refactored to reduce nesting and increase maintainability?

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• Will HTML5/JS Eventually Replace All Client Side Languages? [closed]

  - by Shnitzel

  I'm just wondering about the future of it all. IMHO, there are 4 forces that define where technology goes: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Adobe. It looks like in Apple's iPhone/iPad iADs can now be programmed in HTML5. So does that mean HTML5 will eventually replace objective-c? Also, Microsoft has now shifted it's focus from WPF/Silverlight to HTML5 and I assume Visual Studio 2011 will be all about tooling support for HTML5. Because that's what Microsoft do. (Tools). In a few months IE9 the last major browser will support HTML5. Similarly Adobe is getting on the HTML5 bandwagon and allows to export flash content to HTML5 in their latest tools. And we all know how much in bed Google is with html5. Heck, their latest Operating System (Chrome OS) is nothing but a big fat web browser. Apps for Mobile (i.e., iPhone, Android, WM7) are very hard for a company to program especially for many different devices (each with their own language) so I'm assuming this won't last too long. I.e., HTML5 will be the unifying language. Which is somewhat sad for app developers because now users will be able to play the "cool" html5 apps for free on the web and it'll be hard to charge for them. So are strongly-typed languages really doomed, and in the future, say 5-10 years, will client side programming only be in HTML5? Will all of us become javascript programmers? :) Because the signs are sure pointing that way...

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• Do you ever worry that you're more concerned with how something is built rather than what you are actually building?

  - by Rob Stevenson-Leggett

  As a programmer I have an inherent nagging annoyance at my tools, other peoples code, my code, the world in general. I always want to improve it. So I refactor, I stay on top of the latest techniques. I try and learn patterns, I try to use frameworks so as not to reinvent the wheel. I can write a tech spec that will blow your socks off with the amount of patterns I can squeeze in. However, lately I feel I actually know more about the tools I use than how to actually implement successful software. I feel like I'm lacking in the human factors skill set and I believe that to be a successful software engineer takes more than knowing the coolest framework. I think it needs some of the following skillsets too. Interaction design User experience Marketing I've got a bit of this that I've learned from people I've worked with and great projects I've worked on but I don't feel like I "own" these skills. Am I right? Should I be trying to develop these skills further, or should these be left to the people who do these for a career? How do you make sure you don't get too tied up in how you're doing something and make sure you "make your users awesome"? Does anyone know of good resources for learning these skills from a programming point of view?

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• Unit Tests as a learning tool - a good idea?

  - by Ekkehard.Horner

  I'm interested in ways and means for learning (a) programming language(s) efficiently. I believe that using Unit Test concepts and infrastructure early in that process is a good thing, even better than starting with "Hello world". Why: To write a decent program even for a toy/restricted problem in a new language, you'll have to master many heterogenous concepts (control flow & variables & IO ...), you are tempted to glance over details just to get your program 'to work'. Putting (your understanding of) the facts about the new language in assertions with good descriptions (=success messages) enforces thinking thru/clearness/precision. Grouping topics and adding assertions to such groups is much easier than incorporation features from the 2. chapter of your "Learning X" book to your chapter 1 program. Why not: 'Real' Unit Tests are meant to output "1234 tests ok; 1 failure: saveWorld() chokes on negative input"; 'didactic' Unit Tests should output relevant facts about the new language like perl6 10-string.t # ### p5chop ... ok 13 - p5chop( "cbä" ) returns "ä" ok 14 - after that, victim is changed to "cb" # ### (p6) chop ... ok 27 - (p6) chop( "cbä" ) returns chopped copy: "cb" ok 18 - after that, victim is unchanged: "cbä" # ### chomp ... So (mis?)using Unit Tests may be counterproductive - practicing actions while learning you wouldn't use professionally. How: Writing 'didactic' Unit Tests in languages with lightweight testing systems (Perl 5/6) is easy; (mis?)using more elaborate systems (JUnit, CppUnit) may be not worth the effort or not suitable for a person just starting with a new language. So Is using Unit Tests as a learning tool a bad idea? Can the Unit Test tool(s) of your favourite language(s) used didactically? Should implementation details (eventually) be discussed here or over at stackoverflow.com?

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• Discuss: PLs are characterised by which (iso)morphisms are implemented

  - by Yttrill

  I am interested to hear discussion of the proposition summarised in the title. As we know programming language constructions admit a vast number of isomorphisms. In some languages in some places in the translation process some of these isomorphisms are implemented, whilst others require code to be written to implement them. For example, in my language Felix, the isomorphism between a type T and a tuple of one element of type T is implemented, meaning the two types are indistinguishable (identical). Similarly, a tuple of N values of the same type is not merely isomorphic to an array, it is an array: the isomorphism is implemented by the compiler. Many other isomorphisms are not implemented for example there is an isomorphism expressed by the following client code: match v with | ((?x,?y),?z = x,(y,z) // Felix match v with | (x,y), - x,(y,z) (* Ocaml *) As another example, a type constructor C of int in Felix may be used directly as a function, whilst in Ocaml you must write a wrapper: let c x = C x Another isomorphism Felix implements is the elimination of unit values, including those in tuples: Felix can do this because (most) polymorphic values are monomorphised which can be done because it is a whole program analyser, Ocaml, for example, cannot do this easily because it supports separate compilation. For the same reason Felix performs type-class dispatch at compile time whilst Haskell passes around dictionaries. There are some quite surprising issues here. For example an array is just a tuple, and tuples can be indexed at run time using a match and returning a value of a corresponding sum type. Indeed, to be correct the index used is in fact a case of unit sum with N summands, rather than an integer. Yet, in a real implementation, if the tuple is an array the index is replaced by an integer with a range check, and the result type is replaced by the common argument type of all the constructors: two isomorphisms are involved here, but they're implemented partly in the compiler translation and partly at run time.

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• Is there a process-oriented IDE ?

  - by Raveline

  My problem is simple : when I'm programming in an OO paradigm, I'm often having part of a main business process divided in many classes. Which means, if I want to examine the whole functional chain that leads to the output, for debugging or for optimization research, it can be a bit painful. So I was wondering : is there an IDE that let you put a "process tag" on functions coming from different objects, and give you a view of all those functions having the same tag ? edit : To give an example (that I'm making up completely, sorry if it doesn't sound very realistic). Let's say we have the following business process for a HR application : receive a holiday-request by an employee, check the validity of the request, then give an alert to his boss ("one of those lazy programmer wants another day off"); at the same time, let's say the boss will want to have a table of all employee's timetable during the time the employee wants his vacations; then handle the answer of the boss, send a nice little mail to the employee ("No way, lazy bones"). Even if we get rid of everything not purely business-related (mail sending process, db handling to get the useful info, GUI functionalities, and so on), we still have something that doesn't really fit in "one class". I'd like to have an IDE that would give me the opportunity to embrace quickly, at the very least : The function handling the validation of the request by the employee; The function preparing the "timetable" for the boss; The function handling the validation of the request by the boss; I wouldn't put all those functions in the same class (but perhaps that's my mistake ?). This is where my dreamed IDE could be helpful.

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• Google Programmers

  - by seth

  As a soon-to-be software engineer, I have studied some languages during my time in college. I can name C, C++, Java, Scheme, Ruby, PHP, for example. However, one of the main principles in my college (recognized by many as the best in my country) is to teach us how to learn for ourselves and how to search the web when we have a doubt. This leads to a proactive attitude, when I need something, I go get it and this has worked so far for me. Recently, I started wondering though, how much development would I be able to do without internet access. The answer bugged me quite a bit. I know the concept of the languages, mostly I know what to do, but I was amazed by how "slow" things were without having the google to help in the development. The problem was mostly related to specific syntax but it was not without some effort that i solved some of the SPOJ problems in C++. Is this normal? Should I be worried and try to change something in my programming behaviour? UPDATE: I'll give a concrete example. Reading and writing to a file in java. I have done this about a dozen times in my life, yet every time I need to do it, I end up googling "read file java" and refreshing my memory. I completely understand the code, i fully understand what it does. But I am sure, that without google, it would take me a few tries to read and write correctly (if I had to sit in front of the screen with a blank page and write this without consulting any source whatsoever).

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• Which language is more suitable heavy file tasks?

  - by All

  I need to write a script (based on basic functions) to process /image/audio/video files. The process is mainly filesystem tasks and converts. The database of files has been stored by mysql. The script is simple but cause heavy tasks on the system; for example renaming/converting/copying thousands of file in a run. The script does not read the content of files into memory, it just manage the commands for sub-processes. The main weight is on the communication with filesystem. The script will be used regularly for new files. My concern is about performance. I am thinking of Shell script a complied language like C Please advise which programming language is more suitable for this purpose and why? UPDATE: An example is to scan a folder for images, convert them with ImageMagick, move files to destination folder, get file info, then update the database. As you can see, the process has no room for optimization, and most of languages have similar APIs for popular programs like ImageMagick, MySQL, etc. Thus, it can be written in any language. I just wish to reduce resource usage by speeding up the long loop. NOTE: I know that questions about comparing languages are not favorable, but I really had problem to choose, because the problems can appear in action.

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• Is it OK to use dynamic typing to reduce the amount of variables in scope?

  - by missingno

  Often, when I am initializing something I have to use a temporary variable, for example: file_str = "path/to/file" file_file = open(file) or regexp_parts = ['foo', 'bar'] regexp = new RegExp( regexp_parts.join('|') ) However, I like to reduce the scope my variables to the smallest scope possible so there is less places where they can be (mis-)used. For example, I try to use for(var i ...) in C++ so the loop variable is confined to the loop body. In these initialization cases, if I am using a dynamic language, I am then often tempted to reuse the same variable in order to prevent the initial (and now useless) value from being used latter in the function. file = "path/to/file" file = open(file) regexp = ['...', '...'] regexp = new RegExp( regexp.join('|') ) The idea is that by reducing the number of variables in scope I reduce the chances to misuse them. However this sometimes makes the variable names look a little weird, as in the first example, where "file" refers to a "filename". I think perhaps this would be a non issue if I could use non-nested scopes begin scope1 filename = ... begin scope2 file = open(filename) end scope1 //use file here //can't use filename on accident end scope2 but I can't think of any programming language that supports this. What rules of thumb should I use in this situation? When is it best to reuse the variable? When is it best to create an extra variable? What other ways do we solve this scope problem?

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• Is these company terms good for a programmer or should I move?

  - by o_O

  Here are some of the terms and conditions set forward by my employer. Does these make sense for a job like programming? No freelancing in any way even in your free time outside company work hours (may be okay. May be they wanted their employees to be fully concentrating on their full time job. Also they don't want their employees to do similar work for a competing client. Completely rational in that sense). - So sort of agreed. Any thing you develop like ideas, design, code etc while I'm employed there, makes them the owner of that. Seriously? Don't you think that its bad (for me)? If I'm to develop something in my free time (by cutting down sleep and hard working), outside the company time and resource, is that claim rational? I heard that Steve Wozniak had such a contract while he was working at HP. But that sort of hardware design and also those companies pay well, when compared to the peanuts I get. No other kind of works allowed. Means no open source stuffs. Fully dedicated to being a puppet for the employer, though the working environment is sort of okay. According to my assessment this place would score a 10/12 in Joel's test. So are these terms okay especially considering the fact that I'm underpaid with peanuts?

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• How programmers can afford to NOT learn new things.

  - by newbie

  Good day! I am wondering how programmers learn many things because as a career shifter (from engineering to IT), I find it really hard to absorb everything. Three months ago, I learned HTML/CSS/Javascript. Two months ago, I learned mySQL and CCNA1. One month ago I learned C and Java. Now I am trying to learn J2EE. But it seems that I must combine everything I learned then add more into my brain (especially because J2EE is HUGE! -- XML, servlets, JSP, JSTL, EJB, frameworks(Hibernate, Structs, Spring), JDBC... and so on!!!) So I am wondering, how can programmers learn everything, then add something new without being confused of everything! Because Right now, I feel like my brain is going to explode because of information overload! And these knowledge I am trying to acquire are just the BASICS of programming (icing on the cake)! I still need to learn MORE to become a good programmer! And new technology emerges now and then that requires programmers to learn more again.. Learn.. learn.. learn... Any suggestions on how you as a programmer fit all you've learned into your brain? And how do you know which is the right thing for you to learn? Aren't you afraid that what you've learned may be obsolete next year then start learning again...?

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• First Experience with Web Services

  When I first started programming with Microsoft .Net (1.0 Framework) I had a strong desire to learn how search engines indexed web sites. At that time I was a working as a search engine spammer creating web pages to generate traffic for specific themes for various clients. One way I attempted to better understand .Net was to build a web spider that analyzed web pages on demand. An example of the spider is hosted at AddLinkz.com. After my spider was built I had no real idea what I could/should do with it until I found the MSN Search API. I used this web service to compare its results with my spider. Additionally, I used the API to feed my .Net web spider new URLs from the API based on specific search terms. MSN’s search API was very easy to use, I just had to request information by calling a web URL with parameters via a Get request and the results were returned in XML. At that time all requests were limited to XML responses and a maximum of 1,000 results per query.   Since then the entire API has gone through several reconstructions, rebranding and new search services.  Microsoft’s new Bing API replaced the older MSN search API and added several new search capabilities. These new features allow search data to be returned for web searches, image searches, new searches, and related search terms to name a few. Bing API Version 2.0 SourceTypes Web Searches for web content Sushi Image Searches for images on the web Sushi News Searches news stories Sushi InstantAnswer Searches Encarta online what is sushi, convert 5 feet to meters, x*5=7, and 2 plus 2 Spell Searches Encarta dictionary for spelling suggestions Phonebook Searches phonebook entries sushi in Los Angeles RelatedSearch Returns the query strings most similar to yours Ad Returns advertisements to incorporate with results I currently plan to start using the web search feature from the new Bing 2.0 API in an open source project related to exception management. Currently, it is still in the conception phase.

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• Are these company terms good for a programmer or should I move?

  - by o_O

  Here are some of the terms and conditions set forward by my employer. Does these make sense for a job like programming? No freelancing in any way even in your free time outside company work hours (may be okay. May be they wanted their employees to be fully concentrating on their full time job. Also they don't want their employees to do similar work for a competing client. Completely rational in that sense). - So sort of agreed. Any thing you develop like ideas, design, code etc while I'm employed there, makes them the owner of that. Seriously? Don't you think that its bad (for me)? If I'm to develop something in my free time (by cutting down sleep and hard working), outside the company time and resource, is that claim rational? I heard that Steve Wozniak had such a contract while he was working at HP. But that sort of hardware design and also those companies pay well, when compared to the peanuts I get. No other kind of works allowed. Means no open source stuffs. Fully dedicated to being a puppet for the employer, though the working environment is sort of okay. According to my assessment this place would score a 10/12 in Joel's test. So are these terms okay especially considering the fact that I'm underpaid with peanuts?

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• what languages are good selling points on resume? [closed]

  - by Thomas Galvin

  I have a good amount of experience with C# and Java at the moment but after education and whatnot I wish to be able in more than just 2 high-level, comparatively limited languages, and from what I've seen languages like C(++) or PHP are in demand at the moment. I've thought about learning the following: C. Very standard, lightweight and available on everything. However very old and mostly procedural. C++. Standard like C but I've read in some places that it encourages bad programming design and use of dodgy libraries - but similar things have been said about C too so I'll take that with a grain of salt. D. Quite new but looks promising, but will it be relevant or applicable in the future though? PHP. With the internet becoming ever more important I think this might be the one to go with, but the code itself isn't very intuitive. CoffeeScript (or plain JavaScript). With Microsoft's new idea of HTML5+JS for everything under the sun this doesn't look like a bad choice. However things do change and I wish to be primarily a software dev, not web dev. So out of the above list, or any others that you could suggest, what would you say I should begin to focus on? What is your opinion on staying with C#?

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• Putting Together a Game Design Team?

  - by Kaia

  I'm attempting to put together a game design team that is willing to help me design/program, test, and somewhat produce the game we make to the public. I need anyone who knows anything about programming/coding, designing, etc. Once we get it up and running and out into the world (over dramatic maybe? haha) I have ideas of generating a profit from it so there is a possibility of payment. My thinking on it (so far) is this: 2D (possibly. I haven't decided if I want it 2D or 3D. It really depends on what is easier) 3rd person. Adventure (I want there to be a point to it, but like a point with no real end) I want there to be a story to it. If you've ever played Dofus, think like that. There is a story to the game, but no real end. I want (if possible) to include mini-games. These could end up becoming a possible way for a player to aquire in-game money, quest items, etc. If anyone is interested in helping me create the story line/script (which we will finsih first, before creating the game) please contact me. I want to get this completed as soon as possible.

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• What determines which Javascript functions are blocking vs non-blocking?

  - by Sean

  I have been doing web-based Javascript (vanilla JS, jQuery, Backbone, etc.) for a few years now, and recently I've been doing some work with Node.js. It took me a while to get the hang of "non-blocking" programming, but I've now gotten used to using callbacks for IO operations and whatnot. I understand that Javascript is single-threaded by nature. I understand the concept of the Node "event queue". What I DON'T understand is what determines whether an individual javascript operation is "blocking" vs. "non-blocking". How do I know which operations I can depend on to produce an output synchronously for me to use in later code, and which ones I'll need to pass callbacks to so I can process the output after the initial operation has completed? Is there a list of Javascript functions somewhere that are asynchronous/non-blocking, and a list of ones that are synchronous/blocking? What is preventing my Javascript app from being one giant race condition? I know that operations that take a long time, like IO operations in Node and AJAX operations on the web, require them to be asynchronous and therefore use callbacks - but who is determining what qualifies as "a long time"? Is there some sort of trigger within these operations that removes them from the normal "event queue"? If not, what makes them different from simple operations like assigning values to variables or looping through arrays, which it seems we can depend on to finish in a synchronous manner? Perhaps I'm not even thinking of this correctly - hoping someone can set me straight. Thanks!

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• Can too much abstraction be bad?

  - by m3th0dman

  As programmers I feel that our goal is to provide good abstractions on the given domain model and business logic. But where should this abstraction stop? How to make the trade-off between abstraction and all it's benefits (flexibility, ease of changing etc.) and ease of understanding the code and all it's benefits. I believe I tend to write code overly abstracted and I don't know how good is it; I often tend to write it like it is some kind of a micro-framework, which consists of two parts: Micro-Modules which are hooked up in the micro-framework: these modules are easy to be understood, developed and maintained as single units. This code basically represents the code that actually does the functional stuff, described in requirements. Connecting code; now here I believe stands the problem. This code tends to be complicated because it is sometimes very abstracted and is hard to be understood at the beginning; this arises due to the fact that it is only pure abstraction, the base in reality and business logic being performed in the code presented 1; from this reason this code is not expected to be changed once tested. Is this a good approach at programming? That it, having changing code very fragmented in many modules and very easy to be understood and non-changing code very complex from the abstraction POV? Should all the code be uniformly complex (that is code 1 more complex and interlinked and code 2 more simple) so that anybody looking through it can understand it in a reasonable amount of time but change is expensive or the solution presented above is good, where "changing code" is very easy to be understood, debugged, changed and "linking code" is kind of difficult. Note: this is not about code readability! Both code at 1 and 2 is readable, but code at 2 comes with more complex abstractions while code 1 comes with simple abstractions.

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• Languages with a clear distinction between subroutines that are purely functional, mutating, state-changing, etc?

  - by CPX

  Lately I've become more and more frustrated that in most modern programming languages I've worked with (C/C++, C#, F#, Ruby, Python, JS and more) there is very little, if any, language support for determining what a subroutine will actually do. Consider the following simple pseudo-code: var x = DoSomethingWith(y); How do I determine what the call to DoSomethingWith(y) will actually do? Will it mutate y, or will it return a copy of y? Does it depend on global or local state, or is it only dependent on y? Will it change the global or local state? How does closure affect the outcome of the call? In all languages I've encountered, almost none of these questions can be answered by merely looking at the signature of the subroutine, and there is almost never any compile-time or run-time support either. Usually, the only way is to put your trust in the author of the API, and hope that the documentation and/or naming conventions reveal what the subroutine will actually do. My question is this: Does there exist any languages today that make symbolic distinctions between these types of scenarios, and places compile-time constraints on what code you can actually write? (There is of course some support for this in most modern languages, such as different levels of scope and closure, the separation between static and instance code, lambda functions, et cetera. But too often these seem to come into conflict with each other. For instance, a lambda function will usually either be purely functional, and simply return a value based on input parameters, or mutate the input parameters in some way. But it is usually possible to access static variables from a lambda function, which in turn can give you access to instance variables, and then it all breaks apart.)

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• What are some good resources for creating a game engine in XNA?

  - by Glasser

  I'm currently a student game programmer working on an indie project. We have a team of eleven people (five programmers, four artists, and two audio designers) aboard, all working hard to help design this game. We've been meeting for months now and so far we have a pretty buffed out Game Design Document as well as much audio/visual concept art. Our programmers are itching to progress on our own end. Each person in our programming team is well versed in C++, but is very familiar with C#. We have enough experience and skill that we're confident that we will be successful with our game, and we're looking to build our own game engine in XNA as it seems like it would be worth our time and effort in the end. The game itself will be a 2D beat 'em up style game to be released over xbox live and the PC. It's play style will be similar to that of Castle Crashers or Scott Pilgrim vs The World. We want to design the game engine to allow us to better implement our assets into the game as well as to simplify the creation of design elements/mechanics. Currently between our programmers, we have books such as "XNA 4.0" and "Game Coding Complete, Third Edition," but we'd still like more information on both XNA and (especially) building a game engine from scratch. What are any other good books, websites, or resources we could use to further map out and program our game engine?

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• Breaking up classes and methods into smaller units

  - by micahhoover

  During code reviews a couple devs have recommended I break up my methods into smaller methods. Their justification was (1) increased readability and (2) the back trace that comes back from production showing the method name is more specific to the line of code that failed. There may have also been some colorful words about functional programming. Additionally I think I may have failed an interview a while back because I didn't give an acceptable answer about when to break things up. My inclination is that when I see a bunch of methods in a class or across a bunch of files, it isn't clear to me how they flow together, and how many times each one gets called. I don't really have a good feel for the linearity of it as quickly just by eye-balling it. The other thing is a lot of people seem to place a premium of organization over content (e.g. 'Look at how organized my sock drawer is!' Me: 'Overall, I think I can get to my socks faster if you count the time it took to organize them'). Our business requirements are not very stable. I'm afraid that if the classes/methods are very granular it will take longer to refactor to requirement changes. I'm not sure how much of a factor this should be. Anyway, computer science is part art / part science, but I'm not sure how much this applies to this issue.

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