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  • JQuery code does not work not understanding the markup

    - by Andrae Browne
    I am trying to make a simple animation using JQuery. I have tried adding the script externally(external file) and internally(within script tags). I have testing if the page is recognizing the script using the alert function, but the script is not executing. I am thinking that is has something to do with the syntax. $("#container5").hover(function() { //hover in $(#container5).animate({ height: "250", width: "250", left: "-=50", top: "-=50", }, "fast"); }, function() { //hover out $(#container5).animate({ height: "200", width: "200", left: "+=50", top: "+=50", }, "fast"); } })(jQuery);

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  • Approaches to a week long camp programming course (tips & projects)

    - by Good Person
    I will be teaching a week long programming course to kids between the ages of 11-18. Most of the kids have no programming experience. I'm looking for two things 1) General tips for teaching a camp class (how to make it fun when explaining the difference between int and float) 2) Interesting projects that the kids will be able to complete by the end of the week. Unfortunately the language I'll be required to use is either c++ or Java which means that I'll need to spend more time on itty bitty details than I'd like in a week long course. I feel more competent in c++ than in Java. However if someone can show me that Java is much easier to learn I'll probably teach that instead. My initial idea is to try something like "a game a day" with games like hangman, tic-tac-toe, guess-a-number, wheel-of-fortune, etc. I'll try and update the question text as answers come in to offer more details While there are other questions about teaching programming around I'm looking for advice and tasks that are useful for specifically a week long camp

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  • Mathematics and Game Programming

    - by Xfcn
    I want to program graphical 2D games more complex than the basic 2D stuff I already know. I don't want to do 3D programming. Just more complex 2D stuff. I dropped high school before I could learn a lot of stuff so I walked away with enough algebra knowledge to balance my checkbook and do some light 2D Cartesian programming. Are there any good resources out there for a guy with a limited attention span (say 20 minutes apiece for a subject I'm keenly interested in) to learn, gradually, how to do something more useful with math in programming?

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  • What are developer's problems with helpful error messages?

    - by Moo-Juice
    It continue to astounds me that, in this day and age, products that have years of use under their belt, built by teams of professionals, still to this day - fail to provide helpful error messages to the user. In some cases, the addition of just a little piece of extra information could save a user hours of trouble. A program that generates an error, generated it for a reason. It has everything at its disposal to inform the user as much as it can, why something failed. And yet it seems that providing information to aid the user is a low-priority. I think this is a huge failing. One example is from SQL Server. When you try and restore a database that is in use, it quite rightly won't let you. SQL Server knows what processes and applications are accessing it. Why can't it include information about the process(es) that are using the database? I know not everyone passes an Applicatio_Name attribute on their connection string, but even a hint about the machine in question could be helpful. Another candidate, also SQL Server (and mySQL) is the lovely string or binary data would be truncated error message and equivalents. A lot of the time, a simple perusal of the SQL statement that was generated and the table shows which column is the culprit. This isn't always the case, and if the database engine picked up on the error, why can't it save us that time and just tells us which damned column it was? On this example, you could argue that there may be a performance hit to checking it and that this would impede the writer. Fine, I'll buy that. How about, once the database engine knows there is an error, it does a quick comparison after-the-fact, between values that were going to be stored, versus the column lengths. Then display that to the user. ASP.NET's horrid Table Adapters are also guilty. Queries can be executed and one can be given an error message saying that a constraint somewhere is being violated. Thanks for that. Time to compare my data model against the database, because the developers are too lazy to provide even a row number, or example data. (For the record, I'd never use this data-access method by choice, it's just a project I have inherited!). Whenever I throw an exception from my C# or C++ code, I provide everything I have at hand to the user. The decision has been made to throw it, so the more information I can give, the better. Why did my function throw an exception? What was passed in, and what was expected? It takes me just a little longer to put something meaningful in the body of an exception message. Hell, it does nothing but help me whilst I develop, because I know my code throws things that are meaningful. One could argue that complicated exception messages should not be displayed to the user. Whilst I disagree with that, it is an argument that can easily be appeased by having a different level of verbosity depending on your build. Even then, the users of ASP.NET and SQL Server are not your typical users, and would prefer something full of verbosity and yummy information because they can track down their problems faster. Why to developers think it is okay, in this day and age, to provide the bare minimum amount of information when an error occurs? It's 2011 guys, come on.

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  • Surviving MATLAB and R as a Hardcore Programmer

    - by dsimcha
    I love programming in languages that seem geared towards hardcore programmers. (My favorites are Python and D.) MATLAB is geared towards engineers and R is geared towards statisticians, and it seems like these languages were designed by people who aren't hardcore programmers and don't think like hardcore programmers. I always find them somewhat awkward to use, and to some extent I can't put my finger on why. Here are some issues I have managed to identify: (Both): The extreme emphasis on vectors and matrices to the extent that there are no true primitives. (Both): The difficulty of basic string manipulation. (Both): Lack of or awkwardness in support for basic data structures like hash tables and "real", i.e. type-parametric and nestable, arrays. (Both): They're really, really slow even by interpreted language standards, unless you bend over backwards to vectorize your code. (Both): They seem to not be designed to interact with the outside world. For example, both are fairly bulky programs that take a while to launch and seem to not be designed to make simple text filter programs easy to write. Furthermore, the lack of good string processing makes file I/O in anything but very standard forms near impossible. (Both): Object orientation seems to have a very bolted-on feel. Yes, you can do it, but it doesn't feel much more idiomatic than OO in C. (Both): No obvious, simple way to get a reference type. No pointers or class references. For example, I have no idea how you roll your own linked list in either of these languages. (MATLAB): You can't put multiple top level functions in a single file, encouraging very long functions and cut-and-paste coding. (MATLAB): Integers apparently don't exist as a first class type. (R): The basic builtin data structures seem way too high level and poorly documented, and never seem to do quite what I expect given my experience with similar but lower level data structures. (R): The documentation is spread all over the place and virtually impossible to browse or search. Even D, which is often knocked for bad documentation and is still fairly alpha-ish, is substantially better as far as I can tell. (R): At least as far as I'm aware, there's no good IDE for it. Again, even D, a fairly alpha-ish language with a small community, does better. In general, I also feel like MATLAB and R could be easily replaced by plain old libraries in more general-purpose langauges, if sufficiently comprehensive libraries existed. This is especially true in newer general purpose languages that include lots of features for library writers. Why do R and MATLAB seem so weird to me? Are there any other major issues that you've noticed that may make these languages come off as strange to hardcore programmers? When their use is necessary, what are some good survival tips? Edit: I'm seeing one issue from some of the answers I've gotten. I have a strong personal preference, when I analyze data, to have one script that incorporates the whole pipeline. This implies that a general purpose language needs to be used. I hate having to write a script to "clean up" the data and spit it out, then another to read it back in a completely different environment, etc. I find the friction of using MATLAB/R for some of my work and a completely different language with a completely different address space and way of thinking for the rest to be a huge source of friction. Furthermore, I know there are glue layers that exist, but they always seem to be horribly complicated and a source of friction.

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  • Is there an IDE that can simplify the process of creating a game matchmaking website?

    - by Scott
    Yes, I'm an old guy. And I'm well versed in "C" and have written several games which I have been selling on the web for a number of years. And now, I would like to adapt one of my games to be "online". Sounds simple. I'm sure I can use the thousands of lines of "C" code that I've already written. Right? So my initial investigation begins. First, I think I'll need a server program that lives on a dedicated server (or a VPS probably) that talks to a bunch of client applications that live on individual devices around the world. I can certainly handle that! (I think to myself). I'll break up my existing game into two pieces, a client piece that is just the game displays and buttons, and a server piece that does everything else. Piece of cake, right? But that means that the "server piece" must be executed on a remote machine somewhere and run 24/7. Can I do that? [apparently, that question is so basic, so uneducated, and so lame, that nobody has ever posed it before. Because hours of Googling does not yield an answer. Fine. I'll assume I can do that and move on.] I'll need a "game room", which to me means a website where you log in and then go to a lobby of some kind where you can setup your preferences, see if any of your friends are connected, and create or join games. Should be easy, but it's not. No way. Can I do all this with my local website builder? (which happens to be 90 Second Website Builder, a nice product, btw). It turns out, I can not. I can start with that, but must modify each page, so I can interact with my sql database. So I begin making each page a "PHP" page and dynamically modifying the HTML code with PHP code. I'm already starting to get a headache. Because the resulting web pages looked terrible, I began looking at using JQuery. I want to user a JQuery dialog on my website to display a list of friends and allow the user to select one to invite to the game. [google search for "how to populate a JQuery dialog from a sql database" yields nothing but more confusion.] Javascript? Java? HTML? XML? HTML5? PHP? JQuery? Flash? Sockets? Forms? CSS? Learning about each one of these, and how they interact with each other and/or depend on each other is too much for my feeble old brain. Can anyone simplify this process for me? Is there an IDE that will help me do all this without having to go back to college for a few years? Thanks, Scott

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  • 45 minutes to talk about C# [closed]

    - by Philip
    I have the opportunity to give a 45 minute talk on C# in the theory of programming languages class I'm taking. The college teaches Java almost exclusively, so that's what all the students are most familiar with. (There's a little C, assembly, Prolog and LISP as well.) I decide what to talk about. It seems to me the best approach is to focus on a few of the big, obvious differences between C# and Java. I don't intend it to be a recommendation to use C# -- there are reasons to use each, mostly because of their ecosystems. So I want to focus on C# as a language. I don't want to go too fast and end up listing a whole bunch of features without showing their usefulness. My current plan is this: Functions as first class objects. This is, in my opinion, one of the biggest differences between C# and Java. The professor briefly mentioned this notion and showed a LISP example, but many of the students have probably never used it. I can show real world examples where it's made my code more readable. Lambda expressions as concise syntax for anonymous functions. Obviously with examples to show how this is useful. The real hit-home examples will be at the end when it's combined with the rest. I don't see an advantage to first showing the old delegate syntax and then replacing it with lambdas -- most of us won't have ever seen delegates anyway so it would just be confusing. The yield keyword and how it's different from returning an array. I have the impression that a lot of C# developers aren't familiar with how to use this. It will likely be very foreign to Java developers. I have some examples from my own work where it was really useful, such as iterating over a tree traversal, or iterating over neighbors in a graph where the neighbors aren't stored in memory. In both cases, doing it in Java would likely mean returning a complete list -- with yield I can stop iterating if I find what I want early on, without using memory for superfluous lists or arrays. Extension methods as a way to write implementation on interfaces. We'll all be familiar with how interfaces don't allow method implementation, and how this leads to code duplication. I'll show a specific example of this and how the extension method can solve the problem. Demonstrate how the above can be combined by implementing some simple Linq methods and using them. Where, Select, First, maybe more depending on how much time is left. Ideas on which ones might 'hit home' the best? There are other things I could talk about such as generics, value types, properties and more. I haven't yet though of good ways to incorporate these. In the case of generics and value types, the advantages might not be obvious or as relevant. Properties are obviously useful, particularly since we're taught strict JavaBeans here, but I don't know if I could integrate it with the "path to Linq" discussion above without it feeling tacked on. So I'm looking for thoughts on how to talk about C#, and what to talk about. Even minor details. I'm sure there are more experienced C# developers than me here who have good insight about what's really important in the language, and what would miss the point.

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  • Seeking advice on tools and technology for my new game [closed]

    - by k.k. slider
    I'm a C# developer who has been programming a game in my spare time using XNA and Visual Studio. The game's logic is mostly done and I've completed a prototype that has most of the functionality of (what I envision to be) the final game. However, having heard about the uncertain future and (possibly) limited audience for XNA games, I'm looking to switch platforms... but I don't know what technology would best suit my needs. Below are some specifics about my game and what exactly I'm looking for, if you're interested: The game is a 2D turn-based tactical RPG (strategy game) for two players. It is a basic sprite and tile based game with animations and sound. 3D capabilities are not necessary. I'd like to allow players to compete with others online, and have a basic ranking/matchmaking system. I will probably need something that can interact with a server and a database (the game is turn-based and has no RNG, so cheating would be easy to detect even if most computation is done client-side and minimal data is sent to the server). Ideally, I would be able to release an early version of the game and have people give feedback as I develop additional features (similar to Minecraft). I'd prefer to have a way to release periodic updates to the game instead of releasing an absolute final product. To reach the widest possible audience, I'd prefer technology that allows me to release on PC, Android, iOS, and (maybe) Mac. This is a game with simple mouse inputs which can fit on a mobile touch screen. The game should be monetizable. If I find success with this game, then I may consider becoming a full-time indie game developer. I have several other game ideas and have learned quite a bit from my first attempt at game development. My first thought was an F2P/microtransaction model, but I'm open to other suggestions. Language isn't a primary concern of mine, since I have a decent amount of experience using several languages to program large projects. I'm willing to spend money (e.g. on a developer's license), but the more expensive it gets, the more hesitant I am to use it. I've looked into the following solutions... there are a LOT of tools out there... if anyone has experience with any of these and would like to recommend/reject any of them, it would be helpful. C#/.NET (XNA/MonoGame/SDL/SlimDX/Xamarin/ExEn/ANX?) HTML5/JS (AppMobi/PhoneGap/Marmalade/FlashCanvas/Cordova/libRocket?) Python (Pyglet/Pygame/Kivy?) Java (JavaFX/libGDX?) Unity/Construct 2/Cocos2D/NME/Corona/other game creation software? I'd like something that can do 2D and isn't limited by being too high-level. Other languages (Lua/LOVE? Moai?) Thanks for answering this rather long and tedious question...

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  • WatiN SelectList Methods - Page not refreshing/actions not being fired after interacting with a sele

    - by Chad M
    Preface: If you don't care about the preface, skip down to the section marked "Question." Hi, Recently my company has upgraded to the latest version of WatiN for its test automation framework. We upgraded to avoid a problem where interacting with a select list would cause an ACCSES DENIED error. This error seems to be a product of the fact that our web application reloads the page it is on (which sits in a frame which sits in a frameset) with new fields after certain select lists options are selected. It could also be that our framework, which wraps around WatiN, often does actions on the same SelectList after the page refresh (I'm still looking into this, I'm new to the framework). The new version of WatiN does solve the ACCESS DENIED error, but also seems to stop select lists from firing the action that causes the page to reload w/ its new options. In fact, if you use WatiN to make the selection, the select list won't work correctly, even if manually interacted with, until the page has been forced to refresh. Question: When selecting an option in a SelectList using the newest WatiN code, the event that causes our web app's page to reload with new fields/values does not execute. What are some possibilities that could cause this? The term i've seen used most often to describe the refreshing that occurs when our select lists are used is "double post-back". Many thanks, Chad

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  • jQuery AutoComplete Plugin not working for JSON Response (sValue.substring is not a function)

    - by Sunday Ironfoot
    I'm trying to use the autocomplete plugin for jQuery (this one http://docs.jquery.com/Plugins/Autocomplete). My server is returning JSON string, which I'm trying to process on the client via AutoComplete plugin's 'parse' and 'formatItem' parameters, like so: $(document).ready(function() { $('.searchBox input.textbox').autocomplete('/DoSearch.aspx', { mustMatch: false, autoFill: true, minChars: 1, dataType: 'json', parse: function(data) { var array = new Array(); for (var i = 0; i < data.length; i++) { array[array.length] = { data: data[i], value: data[i].ID, result: data[i].ID }; } return array; }, formatItem: function(row, i, n) { return row.ID + ': ' + row.Title; } }); }); When I run this I get a 'sValue.substring is not a function' error thrown in Firebug. However, if I stick breakpoints on formatItem and parse function, they are hit as expected and contain valid data it seems. Here is an exact copy 'n' paste of the JSON text that gets returned from the server: [{"ID":140177,"Title":"Food Handling","Code":"J01.576.423.200"},{"ID":140178,"Title":"Food Handling","Code":"J01.576.423.200"},{"ID":140179,"Title":"Brain Infarction","Code":"C10.228.140.300.301.200"},{"ID":140180,"Title":"Cerebral Hemorrhage","Code":"C10.228.140.300.535.200"},{"ID":140182,"Title":"Insulin","Code":"D06.472.610.575"},{"ID":140183,"Title":"Insulin","Code":"D06.472.610.575"},{"ID":140184,"Title":"Insulin","Code":"D06.472.610.575"},{"ID":140186,"Title":"Insulin","Code":"D06.472.610.575"},{"ID":140188,"Title":"Insulin","Code":"D06.472.610.575"},{"ID":140189,"Title":"Sulfonylurea Compounds","Code":"D02.886.590.795"}] Please help, I've already searched Google and StackOverflow for help, but can't find anyone having else this error, cheers!

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  • Snow Leopard & LSUIElement -> application not activating properly, window not "active" despite being

    - by Frank R.
    Hi, I'm running into a few problem with a background application that uses LSUIElement=1 to hide its dock item, menu bar and prevent it from appearing in the Command-Tab application switcher. It seems to be a Snow Leopard only problem. The application places an NSStatusItem in the menu bar and pops up a menu when clicked on. Selecting "Preferences..." should bring up an NSWindow with the preferences. The first thing that doesn't seem to work is that the Window does not get ordered in at the front, but appears behind all other application windows. I tried to fix this by calling [[NSApplication sharedApplication] activateIgnoringOtherApps: YES] but that didn't work. After a while I figured out that the menu is blocking the message to the run loop from being sent, so I wrote another method on the MainController and sent the message with a delay: [self performSelector:@selector(setFront:) withObject: [preferencesController window] afterDelay:1.0]; -(void)setFront: (id) theWindow { [[NSApplication sharedApplication]activateIgnoringOtherApps:YES]; [theWindow orderFrontRegardless]; [theWindow makeKeyWindow]; [[NSApplication sharedApplication] activateIgnoringOtherApps:YES]; } Note the send-every-possible-message-to-make-it-do-what-it-should-be-doing-approach. This works, kind-of, the window is brought to the front on top of all other windows from all apps, BUT most of the time it isn't active, meaning it's title bar is greyed out. Clicking on the title bar won't make the window active either. Clicking INSIDE of the window will make it active!? This all didn't seem to be a problem in Leopard; just calling activateIgnoringOtherApps and making the window key seemed to work just fine. In Snow Leopard there is a new API designed to replace LSUIElement that is supposed to emulate its behaviour: http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/releasenotes/cocoa/appkit.html I've played around with that, but it's SL-only and I haven't been able to get LSUIElement being set. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

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  • ASP.NET MVC on GoDaddy Not Working (Not Primary Domain Deployment)

    - by JPrescottSanders
    I am trying to get ASP.NET MVC working on GoDaddy and I'm not having much luck. I have read the post on SO that covers the subject, but I must have a slightly different configuration or must be missing somehting along the way because the main MVC page comes up, but all links seem to fail and no amount of tweaking the URLs seems to get it to work. A little back ground. I have a single hosting plan with many domains pointed to sub folders of the main domain. Basic ASP.NET web forms pages work just fine, but of course I wanted to try and host a sample MVC site in one of these non-primary domains. You can go to the URL here. As you can see this first page comes up, but if you click on Home or About it doesn't work. Clicking on Home creates this link "http://www.jprescottsanders.com/jps/" and clicking on about creates this link "http://www.jprescottsanders.com/jps/Home/About". As you can see JPS sneaks in there, this of course is the sub folder that i place my web app files in. I would like to know if this is a MVC related issue or a GoDaddy issue. I suspect that MVC may want to sit in the root directory of the site, and when it puts the "jps" into the URLs it breaks the routing mechanisms (but this is conjecture). I know Dan said this was possible so I'm hoping he sees this and helps me get to the bottom of this deployment strategy for MVC.

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  • text not wrapping around some floated images, wraps in IE & FF but not chrome, safari

    - by Hartley
    This is unlike anything I've read about and I've been totally scratching my head for the last few hours trying to figure out what's going on. I have a hand-coded site @ hartbro.com Part of the site is a blog, in which I include pictures. Here's the HTML code around one of the images that's causing trouble. <a href="blogcontent/090811.jpg" class="img"> <img src="blogcontent/090811.jpg" alt="Downed trees" width="25%" class="floatright" /></a> The storm left as quickly as it came. The sky cleared up and we were glad that the oppressive heat had let up. What I've noticed is that, on some of the blog entries that include more than one image, the 2nd image isn't really floating like its supposed to be, with the text wrapping around it. I figure its got to be some sort of conflict with some CSS that I have that's causing the problem but I just can't figure out what it is. I don't understand how it works in FF & IE but not Chrome or Safari?? Here's all of the relevant CSS, let me know if you need anything else. Thanks in advance. img{ margin:10px; } img.floatleft{ float:left; } img.floatright{ float:right; } edit: here's an screen-shot of what's happening.

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  • Coding in large chunks ... Code verification skills

    - by Andrew
    As a follow up to my prev question: What is the best aproach for coding in a slow compilation environment To recap: I am stuck with a large software system with which a TDD ideology of "test often" does not work. And to make it even worse the features like pre-compiled headers/multi-threaded compilation/incremental linking, etc is not available to me - hence I think that the best way out would be to add the extensive logging into the system and to start "coding in large chunks", which I understand as code for a two-three hours first (as opposed to 15-20 mins in TDD) - thoroughly eyeball the code for a 15 minutes and only after all that do the compilation and run the tests. As I have been doing TDD for a quite a while, my code eyeballing / code verification skills got rusty (you don't really need this that much if you can quickly verify what you've done in 5 seconds by running a test or two) - so I am after a recommendations on how to learn these source code verification/error spotting skills again. I know I was able to do that easily some 5-10 years ago when I din't have much support from the compiler/unit testing tools I had until recently, thus there should be a way to get back to the basics.

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  • Suggestions for implementing a dynamic 2D level

    - by Wouter
    I am working on a game that needs a level that is completely generated. Currently my approach is to draw textures for the levels pixel by pixel during the game (in XNA with SpriteBatch). This is too intensive unfortunately. The game has frame drops even when I only draw 1 level texture each draw cycle. Here is an example of the current prototype. It is a simple sidescroller with the avatar swimming through a cave. The shape of this cave will alter throughout the level (textures and physics collision shapes). You can clearly see the boundaries of the level tiles in the screenshot below. These are generated just before they move into camera view. For inspiration I looked at PixelJunk Shooter 2. These levels are obviously not generated, but some of the levels have movement. How do you guys think they implemented it? My guess is that the level and other objects in the game are actually flat 3d models, but I am not sure..

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  • What is the advantage of currying?

    - by Mad Scientist
    I just learned about currying, and while I think I understand the concept, I'm not seeing any big advantage in using it. As a trivial example I use a function that adds two values (written in ML). The version without currying would be fun add(x, y) = x + y and would be called as add(3, 5) while the curried version is fun add x y = x + y (* short for val add = fn x => fn y=> x + y *) and would be called as add 3 5 It seems to me to be just syntactic sugar that removes one set of parentheses from defining and calling the function. I've seen currying listed as one of the important features of a functional languages, and I'm a bit underwhelmed by it at the moment. The concept of creating a chain of functions that consume each a single parameter, instead of a function that takes a tuple seems rather complicated to use for a simple change of syntax. Is the slightly simpler syntax the only motivation for currying, or am I missing some other advantages that are not obvious in my very simple example? Is currying just syntactic sugar?

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  • Types of quotes for an HTML templating language

    - by Ralph
    I'm developing a templating language, and now I'm trying to decide on what I should do with quotes. I'm thinking about having 3 different types of quotes which are all handled differently: backtick ` double quote " single quote ' expand variables ? yes no escape sequences no yes ? escape html no yes yes Backticks Backticks are meant to be used for outputting JavaScript or unescaped HTML. It's often handy to be able to pass variables into JS, but it could also cause issues with things being treated as variables that shouldn't. My variables are PHP-style ($var) so I'm thinking that might mess with jQuery pretty bad... but if I disable variable expansion w/ backticks then, I'm not sure how would insert a variable into a JS code block? Single Quotes Not sure if escape sequences like \n should be treated as literals or converted. I find it pretty rare that I want to disable escape sequences, but if you do, you could use backticks. So I'm leaning towards "yes" for this one, but that would be contrary to how PHP does it. Double Quotes Pretty certain I want everything enabled for this one. Modifiers I'm also thinking about adding modifiers like @ or r in front of the string that would change some of these options to enable a few more combinations. I would need 9 different quotes or 3 quotes and 2 modifiers to get every combination wouldn't I? My language also supports "filters" which can be applied against any "term" (number, variable, string) so you could always write something like "blah blah $var blah"|expandvars Or "my string"|escapehtml Thoughts? What would you prefer? What would be least confusing/most intuitive?

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  • Should one always know what an API is doing just by looking at the code?

    - by markmnl
    Recently I have been developing my own API and with that invested interest in API design I have been keenly interested how I can improve my API design. One aspect that has come up a couple times is (not by users of my API but in my observing discussion about the topic): one should know just by looking at the code calling the API what it is doing. For example see this discussion on GitHub for the discourse repo, it goes something like: foo.update_pinned(true, true); Just by looking at the code (without knowing the parameter names, documentation etc.) one cannot guess what it is going to do - what does the 2nd argument mean? The suggested improvement is to have something like: foo.pin() foo.unpin() foo.pin_globally() And that clears things up (the 2nd arg was whether to pin foo globally, I am guessing), and I agree in this case the later would certainly be an improvement. However I believe there can be instances where methods to set different but logically related state would be better exposed as one method call rather than separate ones, even though you would not know what it is doing just by looking at the code. (So you would have to resort to looking at the parameter names and documentation to find out - which personally I would always do no matter what if I am unfamiliar with an API). For example I expose one method SetVisibility(bool, string, bool) on a FalconPeer and I acknowledge just looking at the line: falconPeer.SetVisibility(true, "aerw3", true); You would have no idea what it is doing. It is setting 3 different values that control the "visibility" of the falconPeer in the logical sense: accept join requests, only with password and reply to discovery requests. Splitting this out into 3 method calls could lead to a user of the API to set one aspect of "visibility" forgetting to set others that I force them to think about by only exposing the one method to set all aspects of "visibility". Furthermore when the user wants to change one aspect they almost always will want to change another aspect and can now do so in one call.

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  • Design for XML mapping scenarios between two different systems [on hold]

    - by deepak_prn
    Mapping XML fields between two systems is a mundane routine in integration scenarios. I am trying to make the design documents look better and provide clear understanding to the developers especially when we do not use XSLT or any other IDE such as jDeveloper or eclipse plugins. I want it to be a high level design but at the same time talk in developer's language. So that there is no requirements that slip under the crack. For example, one of the scenarios goes: the store cashier sells an item, the transaction data is sent to Data management system. Now, I am writing a functional design for the scenario which deals with mapping XML fields between our system and the data management system. Question : I was wondering if some one had to deal with mapping XML fields between two systems? (without XSLT being involved) and if you used a table to represent the fields mapping (example is below) or any other visualization tool which does not break the bank ? I am trying to find out if there is a better way to represent XML mapping in your design documents. The widely accepted and used method seems to be using a simple table such as in the picture to illustrate the mapping. I am wondering if there are alternate ways/ tools to represent such as in Altova:

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  • When and why you should use void (instead of i.e. bool/int)

    - by Jonas
    I occasionally run into methods where a developer chose to return something which isn't critical to the function. I mean, when looking at the code, it apparently works just as nice as a void and after a moment of thought, I ask "Why?" Does this sound familiar? Sometimes I would agree that most often it is better to return something like a bool or int, rather then just do a void. I'm not sure though, in the big picture, about the pros and cons. Depending on situation, returning an int can make the caller aware of the amount of rows or objects affected by the method (e.g., 5 records saved to MSSQL). If a method like "InsertSomething" returns a boolean, I can have the method designed to return true if success, else false. The caller can choose to act or not on that information. On the other hand, May it lead to a less clear purpose of a method call? Bad coding often forces me to double-check the method content. If it returns something, it tells you that the method is of a type you have to do something with the returned result. Another issue would be, if the method implementation is unknown to you, what did the developer decide to return that isn't function critical? Of course you can comment it. The return value has to be processed, when the processing could be ended at the closing bracket of method. What happens under the hood? Did the called method get false because of a thrown error? Or did it return false due to the evaluated result? What are your experiences with this? How would you act on this?

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  • Collision Resolution

    - by ultifinitus
    Hey all, I'm making a simple side-scrolling game, and I would appreciate some input! My collision detection system is a simple bounding box detection, so it's really easy to implement. However my collision resolution is ridiculous! Currently I have a little formula like this: if (colliding(firstObject,secondObject)) firstObject.resolve_collision(yAxisOffset); if (colliding(firstObject,secondObject)) firstObject.resolve_collision(xAxisOffset); where yAxisOffset is only set if the first object's previous y position was outside the second object's collision frame, respectively xAxisOffset as well. Now this is working great, in general. However there is a single problem. When I have a stack of objects and I push the first object against that stack, the first object get's "stuck," on the stack. What's I think is happening is the object's collision system checks and resolves for collisions based on creation time, so If I check one axis, then the other, the object will "sink" object directly along the checking axis. This sinking action causes the collision detection routine to think there's a gap between our position and the other object's position, and when I finally check the object that I've already sunk into, my object's position is resolved to it's original position... All this is great, and I'm sure if I bang my head against a wall long enough i'll come up with a working algorithm, but I'd rather not =). So what in the heck do you think I should do? How could I change my collision resolution system to fix this? Here's the program (temporary link, not sure how long it'll last) (notes: arrow keys to navigate, click to drop block, x to jump) I'd appreciate any help you can offer!

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  • Why do some people hate Dart? [closed]

    - by Hassan
    First, I'd like to note that this question is not intended to compare two languages or technologies, but is only asking about criticisms aimed at a language. I've always thought it a good idea to somehow get rid of Javascript. It works, but it's just so messy. I think many will agree with me there. And that's how I interpreted Google's release of Dart. It seems to me like a very good alternative to Javascript. Now, it looks like some are not very happy that Google has released this new language. Take a look at this Wikipedia page to see what I'm talking about. If you don't feel like reading it, I'll tell you now that some seem to think that Dart is similar to Microsoft's VBScript, in that it only works on Microsoft's browsers. This goes against the web's openness. But it's my understanding that Dart can be compiled to Javascript, which will allow it to be run on any modern browser (as the Wikipedia article also states). So my question is: are these criticisms valid? Is there a real fear that Google is trying to control the web's front-end to be more compatible with its browser?

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  • Does a mature agile team requires any management?

    - by ashy_32bit
    After a recent heated debate over Scrum, I realized my problem is that I think of management as a quite unnecessary and redundant activity in a fully agile team. I believe a mature Agile team does not require management or any non-technical decision making process whatsoever. To my (apparently erring) eyes it is more than obvious that the only one suitable and capable of managing a mature development team is their coach (who is the most technically competent colleague with proper communication skills). I can't imagine how a Scrum master can contribute to such a team. I am having great difficulty realizing and understanding the value of such things in Scrum and the manager as someone who is not a veteran developer but is well skilled in planning the production cycles when a coach exists in the team. What does that even mean? How on earth can someone with no edge-skills of development manage a highly technical team? Perhaps management here means something else? I see management as a total waste of time and a by-product of immaturity. In my understanding a mature team is fully self-managing. Apparently I'm mistaken since many great people say the contrary but I can't convince myself.

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  • Broad topics needed for teaching game development

    - by livingtech
    I am going to be doing a presentation on game development to an iPhone user group in the near(ish) future. My audience are iPhone developers, but not necessarily very experienced ones, and this is meant to be an introduction. My question is, what broad topics are needed to understand game development? I acknowledge that this is fairly subjective, but I really am hoping for a comprehensive list of high-level topics that apply to a broad enough swath of games that anyone interested in the topic SHOULD know about them. I would be ecstatic with some pointers to any resources that attempt to make a list such as this this. (I have looked, but my google-fu is failing me tonight.) Here's what I have so far: The Game Loop a sub-note about event driven games 2D Animation sprites/texture maps 3D Animation importance of frameworks modeling software Particles and particle effects hit detection AI Obviously I will not be covering all these topics with any depth, more like simply defining them so that after my talk, the audience will (hopefully) be able to wrap their heads around how any given game might be developed. What am I missing?

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  • Question about separating game core engine from game graphics engine...

    - by Conrad Clark
    Suppose I have a SquareObject class, which implements IDrawable, an interface which contains the method void Draw(). I want to separate drawing logic itself from the game core engine. My main idea is to create a static class which is responsible to dispatch actions to the graphic engine. public static class DrawDispatcher<T> { private static Action<T> DrawAction = new Action<T>((ObjectToDraw)=>{}); public static void SetDrawAction(Action<T> action) { DrawAction = action; } public static void Dispatch(this T Obj) { DrawAction(Obj); } } public static class Extensions { public static void DispatchDraw<T>(this object Obj) { DrawDispatcher<T>.DispatchDraw((T)Obj); } } Then, on the core side: public class SquareObject: GameObject, IDrawable { #region Interface public void Draw() { this.DispatchDraw<SquareObject>(); } #endregion } And on the graphics side: public static class SquareRender{ //stuff here public static void Initialize(){ DrawDispatcher<SquareObject>.SetDrawAction((Square)=>{//my square rendering logic}); } } Do this "pattern" follow best practices? And a plus, I could easily change the render scheme of each object by changing the DispatchDraw parameter, as in: public class SuperSquareObject: GameObject, IDrawable { #region Interface public void Draw() { this.DispatchDraw<SquareObject>(); } #endregion } public class RedSquareObject: GameObject, IDrawable { #region Interface public void Draw() { this.DispatchDraw<RedSquareObject>(); } #endregion } RedSquareObject would have its own render method, but SuperSquareObject would render as a normal SquareObject I'm just asking because i do not want to reinvent the wheel, and there may be a design pattern similar (and better) to this that I may be not acknowledged of. Thanks in advance!

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