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• How to shift development culture from tech fetish to focusing on simplicity and getting things done?

  - by Serge

  Looking for ways to switch team/individual culture from chasing latest fads, patterns, and all kinds of best practices to focusing on finding quickest and simplest solutions and shipping features. My definition of "tech fetish": Chasing latest fads, applying new technologies and best practices without considering product/project impact, focusing on micro optimization, creating platforms and frameworks instead of finding simple and quick ways to ship product features. Few examples of culture differences: From "Spent a day on trying to map database query with five complex joins in NHibernate" to "Wrote a SQL query and used DataReader to pull data in" From "Wrote super-fast JSON parser in C++" to "Used Python to parse JSON response and call C++ code" From "Let's use WCF because it supports all possible communication standards" to "REST is simple text-based format, let's stick with it and use simple HTTP handlers"

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• How to deal with tautology in comments?

  - by Tamás Szelei

  Sometimes I find myself in situations when the part of code that I am writing is (or seems to be) so self-evident that its name would be basically repeated as a comment: class Example { /// <summary> /// The location of the update. /// </summary> public Uri UpdateLocation { get; set; }; } (C# example, but please refer to the question as language-agnostic). A comment like that is useless; what am I doing wrong? Is it the choice of the name that is wrong? How could I comment parts like this better? Should I just skip the comment for things like this?

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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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• Java Applet Tower Defence Game needs tweeking

  - by Ephiras

  Hello :) i have made a tower defence Game for my computer science class as one of my major projects, but have encountered some rather fatal roadblocks. here they are creating a menu screen (class Menu) that can set the total number of enimies, the max number of towers, starting money and the map. i tried creating a constructor in my Main class that sets all the values to whatever the Menu class passes in. I want the Menu screen to close after a difficulty has been selected and the main class to begin. Another problem i would really like some help with is instead of having to write entire arrays i would like to create a small segment of code that runs through an entire picture and sets up an array based on that pixels color.this way i can have multiple levels just dragged into a level folder and have the program read through them. users can even create their own. so a 1 if its yellow, a two if blue and a 3 if purple, then everything else = 0; you can download all the classes and code uif you'd like here sorry about having to redirect you but i wasn't sure how to efficently add a code spoiler. help is greatly appreciated

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• Stuff you learned in school, that you have never used again?

  - by Mercfh

  Obviously we learn plenty of things in our University/College/Whatever that probably don't apply to everyday use, but is there anything that stands out particularly? Maybe something that was concentrated ALOT on? For me it was def. 2 things: OO Concepts and Pointers I still use OO, but not nearly to the amount people made it out to be, i can see where it'd be useful but in my line of work we don't have huge amounts of classes, maybe a couple at most. And there certainly isn't much OO reuse (i finally figured out what that means lol) Pointers are another thing, again I can see where they'd be useful...however I barely barely ever touch them, nor do the others I work with. I guess language choice has alot to do with that but still. What about you guys? edit: For those who are asking I work for a Large Printer company, and most of the Applications we work on are Java+XML and Actionscript for "Printer Apps". But we are moving towards other languages (think like webkits and stuff). So the Code amounts per parts are quite small. I never say OO wasn't useful I just said I personally havent seen it used in my workplace much.

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• Which web site gives the most accurate indication of a programmer's capabilities?

  - by Jerry Coffin

  If you were hiring programmers, and could choose between one of (say) the top 100 coders on topcoder.com, or one of the top 100 on stackoverflow.com, which would you choose? At least to me, it would appear that topcoder.com gives a more objective evaluation of pure ability to solve problems and write code. At the same time, despite obvious technical capabilities, this person may lack any hint of social skills -- he may be purely a "lone coder", with little or no ability to help/work with others, may lack mentoring ability to help transfer his technical skills to others, etc. On the other hand, stackoverflow.com would at least appear to give a much better indication of peers' opinion of the coder in question, and the degree to which his presence and useful and helpful to others on the "team". At the same time, the scoring system is such that somebody who just throws up a lot of mediocre (or even poor answers) will almost inevitably accumulate a positive total of "reputation" points -- a single up-vote (perhaps just out of courtesy) will counteract the effects of no fewer than 5 down-votes, and others are discouraged (to some degree) from down-voting because they have to sacrifice their own reputation points to do so. At the same time, somebody who makes little or no technical contribution seems unlikely to accumulate a reputation that lands them (even close to) the top of the heap, so to speak. So, which provides a more useful indication of the degree to which this particular coder is likely to be useful to your organization? If you could choose between them, which set of coders would you rather have working on your team?

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• How is intermediate data organized in MapReduce?

  - by Pedro Cattori

  From what I understand, each mapper outputs an intermediate file. The intermediate data (data contained in each intermediate file) is then sorted by key. Then, a reducer is assigned a key by the master. The reducer reads from the intermediate file containing the key and then calls reduce using the data it has read. But in detail, how is the intermediate data organized? Can a data corresponding to a key be held in multiple intermediate files? What happens when there is too much data corresponding to one key to be held by a single file? In short, how do intermediate partitions differ from intermediate files and how are these differences dealt with in the implementation?

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• Are there currently any modern, standardized, aptitude test for software engineering?

  - by Matthew Patrick Cashatt

  Background I am a working software engineer who is in the midst of seeking out a new contract for the next year or so. In my search, I am enduring several absurd technical interviews as indicated by this popular question I asked earlier today. Even if the questions I was being asked weren't almost always absurd, I would be tired nonetheless of answering them many times over for various contract opportunities. So this got me thinking that having a standardized exam that working software professionals could take would provide a common scorecard that could be referenced by interviewers in lieu of absurd technical interview questions (i.e. nerd hazing). Question Is there a standardized software engineering aptitude test (SEAT??) available for working professionals to take? If there isn't a such an exam out there, what questions or topics should be covered? An additional thought Please keep in mind, if suggesting a question or topic, to focus on questions or topics that would be relevant to contemporary development practices and realistic needs in the workforce as that would be the point of a standard aptitude test. In other words, no clown traversal questions.

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• How to create an Orthographic display in OpenGL (ES) that handles different screen sizes and orientations?

  - by Piku

  I'm trying to create an iPad/iPhone game using GLES2.0 that contains a 3D scene with a heads-up-display/GUI overlaid on the top. However, this problem would also apply if I were to port my game to a computer and run the game in a resizable window, or allow the user to change screen resolutions... When trying to make the 2D GUI/HUD work I've made the assumption that all I'm really doing is drawing a load of 2D textured 'quads' on the screen and am trying to treat the orthographic projection as an old-style 2D display with 0,0 in the upper left and screenWidth,ScreenHeight in the lower right. This causes me all sorts of confusion when I rotate my ipad into Landscape mode since I can't work out what to put into my projection and modelview matrices to turn everything around the right way. It also gets messy if I want to support the iPad's large screen, an iPhone or a Retina display since I have to then draw three sets of textures for everything and work out which ones to use. Should I be trying to map the 2D OpenGL co-ords 1:1 with the screen? While typing out this question it occurs to me that I could keep my origin in the centre, still running -1/+1 along the axes. This would let me scale my 2D content appropriately on the different screen sizes, but wouldn't I end up with the textures being scaled and possibly losing quality? I'm using OpenGLES 2.0 and have a matrix library that has equivalents to the GLES1.1 glOrthof() and glFrustrum() calls.

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• Should a project start with the client or the server?

  - by MadBurn

  Pretty simple question with a complex answer. Should a project start with the client or the server, and why? Where should a single programmer start a client/server project? What are the best practices and what are the reasons behind them? If you can't think of any, what reasons do you use to justify why you would choose to start one before the other? Personally, I'm asking this question because I'm finishing up specs for a project I will be doing for myself on the side for fun. But now that I'm finishing this phase, I'm wondering "ok, now where do I begin?" Since I've never done a project like this by myself, I'm not sure where I should start. In this project, my server will be doing all the heavy lifting and the client will just be sending updates, getting information from the server, and displaying it. But, I don't want that to sway the answer as I'm looking for more of an in depth and less specific answer that would apply to any project I begin in the future.

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• "Opportunity" to take over maintenance of a small internal website. What should I do?

  - by Dan

  I have been offered an "opportunity" to take over maintenance of a small internal website run by my group that provides information about schedules and photos of events the groups done. My manager sent me the link to the site and checked it out. The site looked clean and neat but loaded in ~5 seconds. I thought this was a little long considering the site really didn't contain a lot of content. This prompted me to take a look under the hood at the pages source code. To my horror it'd been totally hacked together using nested tables! I'm new so I really can't say no to this "opportunity" so what should I do with it? Every fiber of my being feels that the only correct thing to do is over hall the site using CSS, Div's, Span's and any other appropriate tags that a sane/good web developer would used to begin with instead of depending on the render incentive magic of tables. But I'd like to ask programmers with more experienced then me, who have been in this situation. What should I do? Is my only realistic option to leave the horror as is and only adjusting the content as requested? I'm really torn between good development and the corporate reality I'm part of. Is there some kind of middle ground where things can be made better even if they're not perfect? Thanks ahead of time.

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• Dealing with curly brace soup

  - by Cyborgx37

  I've programmed in both C# and VB.NET for years, but primarily in VB. I'm making a career shift toward C# and, overall, I like C# better. One issue I'm having, though, is curly brace soup. In VB, each structure keyword has a matching close keyword, for example: Namespace ... Class ... Function ... For ... Using ... If ... ... End If If ... ... End If End Using Next End Function End Class End Namespace The same code written in C# ends up very hard to read: namespace ... { class ... { function ... { for ... { using ... { if ... { ... } if ... { ... } } } // wait... what level is this? } } } Being so used to VB, I'm wondering if there's a technique employed by c-style programmers to improve readability and to ensure that your code ends up in the correct "block". The above example is relatively easy to read, but sometimes at the end of a piece of code I'll have 8 or more levels of curly braces, requiring me to scroll up several pages to figure out which brace ends the block I'm interested in.

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• Why do memory-managed languages retain the `new` keyword?

  - by Channel72

  The new keyword in languages like Java, Javascript, and C# creates a new instance of a class. This syntax seems to have been inherited from C++, where new is used specifically to allocate a new instance of a class on the heap, and return a pointer to the new instance. In C++, this is not the only way to construct an object. You can also construct an object on the stack, without using new - and in fact, this way of constructing objects is much more common in C++. So, coming from a C++ background, the new keyword in languages like Java, Javascript, and C# seemed natural and obvious to me. Then I started to learn Python, which doesn't have the new keyword. In Python, an instance is constructed simply by calling the constructor, like: f = Foo() At first, this seemed a bit off to me, until it occurred to me that there's no reason for Python to have new, because everything is an object so there's no need to disambiguate between various constructor syntaxes. But then I thought - what's really the point of new in Java? Why should we say Object o = new Object();? Why not just Object o = Object();? In C++ there's definitely a need for new, since we need to distinguish between allocating on the heap and allocating on the stack, but in Java all objects are constructed on the heap, so why even have the new keyword? The same question could be asked for Javascript. In C#, which I'm much less familiar with, I think new may have some purpose in terms of distinguishing between object types and value types, but I'm not sure. Regardless, it seems to me that many languages which came after C++ simply "inherited" the new keyword - without really needing it. It's almost like a vestigial keyword. We don't seem to need it for any reason, and yet it's there. Question: Am I correct about this? Or is there some compelling reason that new needs to be in C++-inspired memory-managed languages like Java, Javascript and C#?

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• Which is preferable? To know jQuery well, or to know JavaScript well? [closed]

  - by Marwan

  I'm quite familiar with using jQuery, but I've come to feel like a bit of a dummy using it, as my knowledge of JavaScript itself is rather poor. So I'm considering abandoning jQuery and spending time working in straight JS... perhaps even creating my own framework as a learning experience. Does this make sense though? Is there any real point to obtaining more than a passing knowledge of JavaScript when jQuery allows me to accomplish so much, so quickly?

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• Push-Based Events in a Services Oriented Architecture

  - by Colin Morelli

  I have come to a point, in building a services oriented architecture (on top of Thrift), that I need to expose events and allow listeners. My initial thought was, "create an EventService" to handle publishing and subscribing to events. That EventService can use whatever implementation it desires to actually distribute the events. My client automatically round-robins service requests to available service hosts which are determined using Zookeeper-based service discovery. So, I'd probably use JMS inside of EventService mainly for the purpose of persisting messages (in the event that a service host for EventService goes down before it can distribute the message to all of the available listeners). When I started considering this, I began looking into the differences between Queues and Topics. Topics unfortunately won't work for me, because (at least for now), all listeners must receive the message (even if they were down at the time the event was pushed, or hadn't made a subscription yet because they haven't completed startup (during deployment, for example) - messages should be queued until the service is available). However, I don't want EventService to be responsible for handling all of the events. I don't think it should have the code to react to events inside of it. Each of the services should do what it needs with a given event. This would indicate that each service would need a JMS connection, which questions the value of having EventService at all (as the services could individually publish and subscribe to JMS directly). However, it also couples all of the services to JMS (when I'd rather that there be a single service that's responsible for determining how to distribute events). What I had thought was to publish an event to EventService, which pulls a configuration of listeners from some configuration source (database, flat file, irrelevant for now). It replicates the message and pushes each one back into a queue with information specific to that listener (so, if there are 3 listeners, 1 event would become 3 events in JMS). Then, another thread in EventService (which is replicated, running on multiple hots) would be pulling from the queue, attempting to make the service call to the "listener", and returning the message to the queue (if the service is down), or discarding the message (if the listener completed successfully). tl;dr If I have an EventService that is responsible for receiving events and delegating service calls to "event listeners," (which are really just endpoints on other services), how should it know how to craft the service call? Should I create a generic "Event" object that is shared among all services? Then, the EventService can just construct this object and pass it to the service call. Or is there a better answer to this problem entirely?

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• Implementing a FSM with ActionScript 2 without using classes?

  - by Up2u

  I have seen several references of A.I. and FSM, but sadly I still can't understand the point of an FSM in AS2.0. Is it a must to create a class for each state? I have a game-project which also it has an A.I., the A.I. has 3 states: distanceCheck, ChaseTarget, and Hit the target. It's an FPS game and played via mouse. I have created the A.I. successfully, but I want to convert it to FSM method... My first state is CheckDistanceState() and in that function I look for the nearest target and trigger the function ChaseState(), there I insert the Hit() function to destroy the enemy, The 3 functions that I created are being called in AI_cursor.onEnterframe. Is there any chance to implement an FSM without the need to create a class? From what I've read before, you have to create a class. I prefer to write the code on frames in flash and I still don't understand how to have external classes.

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• Maximum Length Of IP Address: 15 (IPv4) & 39(IPv6)

  - by Gopinath

  Problem You are designing a database table for a web application that requires to store IP address of users who visits the site. The IP address is required to be stored a character data in the table. To define size of the character column you need to know maximum length of IP address. So, what is the maximum length of an IP address? Solution The IPv4 version of IP address is in the following format 255.255.255.255 To store IPv4 address we require 15 characters. The IPv6 version of IP address is grouped into sets of 4 hex digits separated by colons, like the below 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334 To store IPv6 address you require a 39 characters long column. Conclusion As IPv4 and IPv6 are the commonly use protocols, you better define a column with 39 characters length so that both the format address are saved in to the table without any issues. This article titled,Maximum Length Of IP Address: 15 (IPv4) & 39(IPv6), was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• How do I print values of an array in Three Rows?

  - by Ramkumar

  I need this output.. 1 3 5 2 4 6 I want to use array function like array(1,2,3,4,5,6). If I edit this array like array(1,2,3), it means the output need to show like 1 2 3 The concept is maximum 3 column only. If we give array(1,2,3,4,5), it means the output should be 1 3 5 2 4 Suppose we will give array(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9), then it means output is 1 4 7 2 5 8 3 6 9 that is, maximum 3 column only. Depends upon the the given input, the rows will be created with 3 columns. Is this possible with PHP? I am doing small Research & Development in array functions. I think this is possible. Will you help me? For more info: * input: array(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15) * output: 1 6 11 2 7 12 3 8 13 4 9 14 5 10 15

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• BDD: Getting started

  - by thom

  I'm starting with BDD and this is my story: Feature: Months and days to days In order to see months and days as days As a date conversion fan I need a webpage where users can enter days and months and convert them to days. I have some doubts ... Should I write my scenarios before coding anything or should I first write a scenario and then write code, write a scenario again and then write code, and so on ... ? If I should write my scenarios before, can my steps be approved and production code still does not get done? When should I do refactoring on my code? After the feature is done or after each scenario implementation?

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• design a model for a system of dependent variables

  - by dbaseman

  I'm dealing with a modeling system (financial) that has dozens of variables. Some of the variables are independent, and function as inputs to the system; most of them are calculated from other variables (independent and calculated) in the system. What I'm looking for is a clean, elegant way to: define the function of each dependent variable in the system trigger a re-calculation, whenever a variable changes, of the variables that depend on it A naive way to do this would be to write a single class that implements INotifyPropertyChanged, and uses a massive case statement that lists out all the variable names x1, x2, ... xn on which others depend, and, whenever a variable xi changes, triggers a recalculation of each of that variable's dependencies. I feel that this naive approach is flawed, and that there must be a cleaner way. I started down the path of defining a CalculationManager<TModel> class, which would be used (in a simple example) something like as follows: public class Model : INotifyPropertyChanged { private CalculationManager<Model> _calculationManager = new CalculationManager<Model>(); // each setter triggers a "PropertyChanged" event public double? Height { get; set; } public double? Weight { get; set; } public double? BMI { get; set; } public Model() { _calculationManager.DefineDependency<double?>( forProperty: model => model.BMI, usingCalculation: (height, weight) => weight / Math.Pow(height, 2), withInputs: model => model.Height, model.Weight); } // INotifyPropertyChanged implementation here } I won't reproduce CalculationManager<TModel> here, but the basic idea is that it sets up a dependency map, listens for PropertyChanged events, and updates dependent properties as needed. I still feel that I'm missing something major here, and that this isn't the right approach: the (mis)use of INotifyPropertyChanged seems to me like a code smell the withInputs parameter is defined as params Expression<Func<TModel, T>>[] args, which means that the argument list of usingCalculation is not checked at compile time the argument list (weight, height) is redundantly defined in both usingCalculation and withInputs I am sure that this kind of system of dependent variables must be common in computational mathematics, physics, finance, and other fields. Does someone know of an established set of ideas that deal with what I'm grasping at here? Would this be a suitable application for a functional language like F#? Edit More context: The model currently exists in an Excel spreadsheet, and is being migrated to a C# application. It is run on-demand, and the variables can be modified by the user from the application's UI. Its purpose is to retrieve variables that the business is interested in, given current inputs from the markets, and model parameters set by the business.

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• How should bots be recognised in a game?

  - by Bane

  I'm interested in how bots are usually written. Here's my situation: I plan to make an online 2D mecha game in HTML5, and the server-side will be done with node. It is intended to be multiplayer, but I also want to make bots in case there aren't enough players. How does my game logic see them, as players or as bots? Is there a standard by which I should make them? Also, any general tips and hints will be OK.

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• What is So Unique About Node.js?

  - by Adrian Shum

  Recently there has been a lot of praise for Node.js. I am not a developer that has had much exposure to network application. From my bare understanding of Nodes.js, its strength is: we have only one thread handling multiple connections, providing an event-based architecture. However, for example in Java, I can create only one thread using NIO/AIO (which is non-blocking APIs from my bare understanding), and handle multiple connections using that thread, and I provide an event-based architecture to implement the data handling logic (shouldn't be that difficult by providing some callback etc) ? Given JVM being a even more mature VM than V8 (I expect it to run faster too), and event-based handling architecture seems to be something not difficult to create, I am not sure why Node.js is attracting so much attention. Did I miss some important points?

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• Attributes of an Ethical Programmer?

  - by ahmed

  Software that we write has ramifications in the real world. If not, it wouldn't be very useful. Thus, it has the potential to sweep across the world faster than a deadly manmade virus or to affect society every bit as much as genetic manipulation. Maybe we can't see how right now, but in the future our code will have ever-greater potential for harm or good. Of course, there's the issue of hacking. That's clearly a crime. Or is it that clear? Isn't hacking acceptable for our government in the event of national security? What about for other governments? Cases of life-and-death emergency? Tracking down deadbeat parents? Screening the genetic profile of job candidates? Where is the line drawn? Who decides? Do programmers have responsibility for how their code is used? What if a programmer writes code to pry into confidential information or copy-protected material? Does he bear responsibility along with the person who used the program? What about a programmer who knowingly or unknowingly writes code to "fix the books?" Should he be liable?

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• What to use C++ for?

  - by futlib

  I really love C++. However, I'm struggling to find good uses for it lately. It is still the language to use if you're building huge systems with huge performance requirements. Like backend/infrastructure code at Google and Facebook, or high-end games. But I don't get to do stuff like that. It's also a good choice for code that runs close to the hardware. I'd like to do more low-level stuff, but it isn't part of my job, and I can't think of useful private projects that would involve that. Traditionally, C++ was also a good choice for rich client applications, but those are mostly written in C# and Obj-C lately - and aren't really that important anymore, with everything being a web app. Or a mobile app, which are mostly written in Obj-C and Java. And of course, web-based desktop and mobile apps are quite prominent, too. At my job, I work mostly on web applications, using Java, JavaScript and Groovy. Java is a good/popular choice for non-Google-scale backends, Groovy (or Python, or Ruby or Node.js) is pretty good for the server-side of web apps and JavaScript is the only real choice for the client-side. Even the little games I'm writing in my spare time are lately mostly written in JavaScript, so they can run in the browser. So what would you suggest I could use C++ for? I'm aware that this question is very similar. However, I don't want to learn C++, I was a professional C++ programmer for years. I want to keep doing it and find good new use cases for it. I know that I can use C++ for web apps/games. I could even compile C++ to JavaScript with Emscripten. However, it doesn't seem like a good idea. I'm looking for something C++ is really good at to stay competent in the language. If your answer is: Just give up and forget C++, you'll probably never need it again, so be it.

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• Which is a better practice - helper methods as instance or static?

  - by Ilian Pinzon

  This question is subjective but I was just curious how most programmers approach this. The sample below is in pseudo-C# but this should apply to Java, C++, and other OOP languages as well. Anyway, when writing helper methods in my classes, I tend to declare them as static and just pass the fields if the helper method needs them. For example, given the code below, I prefer to use Method Call #2. class Foo { Bar _bar; public void DoSomethingWithBar() { // Method Call #1. DoSomethingWithBarImpl(); // Method Call #2. DoSomethingWithBarImpl(_bar); } private void DoSomethingWithBarImpl() { _bar.DoSomething(); } private static void DoSomethingWithBarImpl(Bar bar) { bar.DoSomething(); } } My reason for doing this is that it makes it clear (to my eyes at least) that the helper method has a possible side-effect on other objects - even without reading its implementation. I find that I can quickly grok methods that use this practice and thus help me in debugging things. Which do you prefer to do in your own code and what are your reasons for doing so?

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