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• Concurrent Programming:Should I write a sequential program first, then add thread safety?

  - by evthim

  I'm working on a project where we have to create a number of threads(actual number will be inputted in by testers (TA's)). I'm having trouble not only with the programming but also with the design, I can't wrap my head around all of the threads that will be invoked and where I might cause errors. The project is due soon so I don't want to waste time on this if it'll actually set me back, but I was wondering if I should write the program like only one thread will be running and everything should be sequential and then later go back and try to add the thread safety parts of the code? Would that take twice the original amount of time? Project Description: Note:I'm going to be as vague as possible so I don't violate any honor codes, sorry :( your program should accept n number of objectA threads, m number of objectB threads, and r number of objectC objectB threads interact with code in objectA. objectA threads interact with code in objectB and objectC objectB and objectC don't directly interact, but do so indirectly through objectA -ex: objectB needs something from objectA. objectA gets the result for that something by calling objectC my confusion stems mostly from the fact that all of this interactions will be done by m+n threads and there are various restrictions throughout the descriptions, like objectB can request something from objectA, and objectA has to wait for objectC to finish that something before returning it to objectB. Also each objectA thread can only work on one instruction from objectB at a time, etc. etc. I just want to know if I write the code so that there is only 1 objectA, 1 objectB and 1 object C, can I go back and easily modify it so that those 1's can be changed to m, n and r? Sorry again, if my description is a little bit confusing.

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• Can anyone give me a sample java socket programming for doing a peer to peer for 3 systems?

  - by Sadesh Kumar N

  I am doing an university project. I need some sample programs on peer to peer programs in java socket programming. Every where people are telling to add a server socket in the client program. I am in a confusion. Can a single program having server socket and client socket will do or i have to create two programs of one initiating a system and another peer program running thrice to solve the problem. or i need to create three programs for three peer systems. I am not clear on the architecture of building peer to peer programs using java sockets. Can some one help me giving a simple program on how to create a peer to peer connection between three systems. I know how to do a socket program for client server model and clear on the concept. But creating a peer to peer architecture sounds complex for me to understand. I also referred this thread. developing peer to peer in java The person commented second says" To make peer2peer app each client opens server socket too. When client A wishes to connect to client B it just connects to its socket. " Need some more sample and an explanation on how peer to peer java socket program works I dont want any external api like jxta to do this task. I need a clear picture on how it works alone with an example.

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• On improving commit practices

  - by greengit

  I was thinking about ways to improving my commit practices. Is there any co-relation between no. of source code lines and no. of commits? In a recent project that I was involved in, I was going at 30 commits per 1000 lines. One typical file from the project has these stats language: JavaScript total commits that include this file: 32 total lines: 1408 source lines: 1140 comment lines: 98 no. of function declarations: 28 other declarations: 8 Another file has these... Language: Python total commits that include this file: 17 total lines: 933 source lines: 730 comment lines: 80 classes: 1 methods: 10 I also think that no. of commits is more related to no. of features or no. of changes to the code and less to the no. of lines. The general git community motto is make short commits and commit often. So, do you really think about you commit strategy before you start the project. For that matter, is there anything like commit strategy? If so, what's yours?

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• Jack of all trades, master of none [closed]

  - by Rope

  I've got a question similar to this one: Is looking for code examples constantly a sign of a bad developer? though not entirely. I got off college 2 years ago and I'm currently struggling with a University study. Most likely I'll have to drop out and start working within the next couple of months. Now here's the pickle. I have no speciality what so ever. When I got out of college I had worked with C, C++ and Java. I had had an internship at NEC-Philips and got familiar with C# (.NET) and I taught myself how it worked. After college I started working with PHP, HTML,SQL, MySQL Javascript and Jquery. I'm currently teaching myself Ruby on Rails and thus Ruby. At my university I also got familiar with MATLAB. As you can see I've got a broad scope of languages and frameworks I'm familiar with, but none I know inside-out. So I guess this kinda applies to me: "Jack of all trades, master of none.". I've been looking for jobs and I've noticed that most of them require some years of experience with a certain language and some specifications that apply to that language. My question is: How do I pick a speciality? And how do I know if I'll actually enjoy it? As I've worked with loads of languages how would I be able to tell this is right for me? I don't like being tied down to a specific role and I quite like being a generalist. But in order to make more money I would need a specialisation. How would I pick something that goes against my nature? Thanks in advance, Rope.

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• How are events in games handled?

  - by Alex

  In may games that I have played, I have seen events being triggered, such as when you walk into a certain land area while holding a specific object, it will trigger a special creature to spawn. I was wondering, how do games deal with events such as this? Not in a specific game, but in general among games. The first thought I had was that each place has a hard-coded set of events that it will call when something happens there. However, that would be too inefficient to maintain, as when something new is added, that would require modification of every part of the game that would potentially cause the event to be called. Next up, I had the idea of maybe how GUI programming works. In all of the GUI programming I've done, you create a component and a callback function, or a listener. Then, when the user interacts when the button, the callback function is called, allowing you to do something with it. So, I was thinking that in terms of a game, when a land area gets loaded the game loops over a list of all events, creating instances of them and calling public methods to bind them to the current scene. The events themselves then handle what scene it is, and if it is a scene that pertains to the event, will call the public method of the scene to bind the event to an action. Then, when the action takes place, the scene would call all events that are bound to that action. However, I'm sure that's not how games would operate either, as that would require a lot of creating of events all the time. So how to video games handle events, are either of those methods correct, or is it something completely different?

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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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• Learning to be a good developer: what parts can you skip over?

  - by Andrew M

  I have set myself the goal of becoming a decent developer by this time next year. By this I mean full experience of the development 'lifecycle,' a few good apps/sites/webapps under my belt, and most importantly being able to work at a steady pace without getting sidelined for hours by some should-know-this-already technique. I'm not starting from scratch. I've written a lot of html/css, SQL, javascript, python and VB.net, and studied other languages like C and Java. I know about things like OOP, design patterns, TDD, complexity, computational linguistics, pointers/references, functional programming, and other academic/theoretical matters. It's just I can't say I've really done these things yet. So I want to get up to speed, and I want to know what things I can leave till a later date. For instance, studying algorithms and the maths behind them is interesting and all, but so far I've hardly needed to write anything but the most basic nested loops. Investigating Assembly to have a clearer picture of low-level operations would be cool... but I imagine rarely infringes on daily work. On the other hand, looking at a functional programming language might help me write programs that are more comprehensible and less prone to hidden failures (at the moment I'm finding the biggest difficulty is when the complexity of the app exceeds my capacity to understand it - for instance passing data around was fine... until I had to start doing it with AJAX, which was a painful step up). I could spend time working through case studies of design patterns, but I'm not sure how many of them get used in 'real life.' I'm a programmer with basic abilities - what skills should I focus on developing? (also my Unix skills are very weak, and also knowledge of Windows configuration... not sure how much time I should spend on that)

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• Are programmers getting lazier and less competent

  - by Skeith

  I started programming in C++ at uni and loved it. In the next term we changed to VB6 and I hated it. I could not tell what was going on, you drag a button to a form and the ide writes the code for you. While I hated the way VB functioned I cannot argue that it was faster and easier than doing the same thing in C++ so i can see why it is a popular language. Now I am not calling VB developers lazy in just saying it easier than C++ and I have noticed that a lot of newer languages are following this trend such a C#. This leads me to think that as more business want quick results more people will program like this and sooner or later there will be no such thing as what we call programming now. Future programmers will tell the computer what they want and the compiler will write the program for them like in star trek. Is this just an under informed opinion of a junior programmer or are programmers getting lazier and less competent in general? EDIT: A lot of answers say why re invent the wheel and I agree with this but when there are wheels available people are not bothering to learn how to make the wheel. I can google how to do pretty much anything in any language and half the languages do so much for you when it come to debugging they have no idea what there code does of how to fix the error. That's how I cam up with the theory that programmers are becoming lazier and less competent as no one cares how stuff works just that it does until it does not.

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• Is Linq having a mind-numbing effect on .NET programmers?

  - by Aaronaught

  A lot of us started seeing this phenomenon with jQuery about a year ago when people started asking how to do absolutely insane things like retrieve the query string with jQuery. The difference between the library (jQuery) and the language (JavaScript) is apparently lost on many programmers, and results in a lot of inappropriate, convoluted code being written where it is not necessary. Maybe it's just my imagination, but I swear I'm starting to see an uptick in the number of questions where people are asking to do similarly insane things with Linq, like find ranges in a sorted array. I can't get over how thoroughly inappropriate the Linq extensions are for solving that problem, but more importantly the fact that the author just assumed that the ideal solution would involve Linq without actually thinking about it (as far as I can tell). It seems that we are repeating history, breeding a new generation of .NET programmers who can't tell the difference between the language (C#/VB.NET) and the library (Linq). What is responsible for this phenomenon? Is it just hype? Magpie tendencies? Has Linq picked up a reputation as a form of magic, where instead of actually writing code you just have to utter the right incantation? I'm hardly satisfied with those explanations but I can't really think of anything else. More importantly, is it really a problem, and if so, what's the best way to help enlighten these people?

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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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• 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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• Software development process for a part time University project for 1 developer?

  - by Pricey

  I will be doing a part time University project soon and the time frame for it is around 8 months with approximately 10-15 hours a week spent working on it, with a review by a tutor each quarter. My question is what software development process would you recommend using when the course requires you to work on your own in order to manage yourself as well as the project? I wanted to use a weekly or bi-weekly iterative approach to my work but a lot of the processes seem tailored to teams of people. I am looking at XP (Extreme Programming) OR Scrum as something that is less than the norm for University work but again Scrum I don't know a lot about yet, and a question I have is; can you say you are doing XP without pair-programming? because my tutor seems to think that I have to stick to all the practices otherwise I can't do it (nevermind if I am working alone). We can have external user input as well but due to the small timescales with part time work it may be more beneficial for myself to be the user as well, which is not what I prefer considering how I can get lost in the design.

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• Is the separation of program logic and presentation layer going too far?

  - by Timwi

  In a Drupal programming guide, I noticed this sentence: The theme hook receives the total number of votes and the number of votes for just that item, but the template wants to display a percentage. That kind of work shouldn't be done in a template; instead, the math is performed here. The math necessary to calculate a percentage from a total and a number is (number/total)*100. Is this application of two basic arithmetic operators within a presentation layer already too much? Is the maintenance of the entire system severely compromised by this amount of mathematics? The WPF (Windows Presentation Framework) and its UI mark-up language, XAML, seem to go to similar extremes. If you try to so much as add two numbers in the View (the presentation layer), you have committed a cardinal sin. Consequently, XAML has no operators for any arithmetic whatsoever. Is this ultra-strict separation really the holy grail of programming? What are the significant gains to be had from taking the separation to such extremes?

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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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• Expanding existing DVCS Wiki

  - by A Lion

  A portion of my job is to maintain technical documentation for a rapidly expanding manufacturing company. Because it is only a portion of my job and the company's product line is expanding so quickly, I can't stay on top of the documentation. As a result, I've been yearning for an information management system with a handful of specific features. I've found many products that have a subset, but none that have all the features I'm looking for. I'm at the point of picking an existing product and expanding it to cover my desired feature set, however, this will be a pet project and I will be learning the underlying language as I go. So, the main question is which existing product will be the easiest to expand to cover the full feature set and has a relatively easy to learn language? Alternatively, have I missed another existing program that will cover the feature set or should be in my list of "close, but not quite there"? Feature Set web interface based on a distributed version control system (e.g., git) easy to edit by logged in novices (e.g. wiki, multimarkdown) outputs in more traditional formats (e.g., doc, odt, pdf) edits held in queue until editor/engineer/manager approves them (e.g., MS Word editing) [this is the really big elephant in list - suggestions on where to start appreciated] edits held in queue specifically for engineer approval [extra limb of the elephant in the list] well-supported in the open source community Closest, but not quite there ikiwiki - http://ikiwiki.info (php) lots of awesome functionality and extensions, including easy to edit and based on DVCS lacks a review/forward for review queue appears to be well-supported within the OSS community gitit - http://gitit.net/ (haskell) easy to edit and based on DVCS lots of outputs in traditional formats a great web-based gui diff interface lacks a review/forward for review queue appears to be primarily maintained by one individual

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• What's the proper term for a function inverse to a constructor? Deconstructor, destructor, or something else?

  - by Petr Pudlák

  Edit: I'm rephrasing the question a bit. Apparently I caused some confusion because I didn't realize that the term destructor is used in OOP for something quite different - it's a function invoked when an object is being destroyed. In functional programming we (try to) avoid mutable state so there is no such equivalent to it. (I added the proper tag to the question.) Instead, I've seen that the record field for unwrapping a value (especially for single-valued data types such as newtypes) is sometimes called destructor or perhaps deconstructor. For example, let's have (in Haskell): newtype Wrap = Wrap { unwrap :: Int } Here Wrap is the constructor and unwrap is what? I've seen both, for example: ... Most often, one supplies smart constructors and destructors for these to ease working with them. ... at Haskell wiki, or ... The general theme here is to fuse constructor - deconstructor pairs like ... at Haskell wikibook (here it's probably meant in a bit more general sense). The questions are: How do we call unwrap in functional programming? Deconstructor? Destructor? Or by some other term? And to clarify, is this terminology applicable to other functional languages, or is it used just in the Has

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• Thoughts on type aliases/synonyms?

  - by Rei Miyasaka

  I'm going to try my best to frame this question in a way that doesn't result in a language war or list, because I think there could be a good, technical answer to this question. Different languages support type aliases to varying degrees. C# allows type aliases to be declared at the beginning of each code file, and they're valid only throughout that file. Languages like ML/Haskell use type aliases probably as much as they use type definitions. C/C++ are sort of a Wild West, with typedef and #define often being used seemingly interchangeably to alias types. The upsides of type aliasing don't invoke too much dispute: It makes it convenient to define composite types that are described naturally by the language, e.g. type Coordinate = float * float or type String = [Char]. Long names can be shortened: using DSBA = System.Diagnostics.DebuggerStepBoundaryAttribute. In languages like ML or Haskell, where function parameters often don't have names, type aliases provide a semblance of self-documentation. The downside is a bit more iffy: aliases can proliferate, making it difficult to read and understand code or to learn a platform. The Win32 API is a good example, with its DWORD = int and its HINSTANCE = HANDLE = void* and its LPHANDLE = HANDLE FAR* and such. In all of these cases it hardly makes any sense to distinguish between a HANDLE and a void pointer or a DWORD and an integer etc.. Setting aside the philosophical debate of whether a king should give complete freedom to their subjects and let them be responsible for themselves or whether they should have all of their questionable actions intervened, could there be a happy medium that would allow the benefits of type aliasing while mitigating the risk of its abuse? As an example, the issue of long names can be solved by good autocomplete features. Visual Studio 2010 for instance will alllow you to type DSBA in order to refer Intellisense to System.Diagnostics.DebuggerStepBoundaryAttribute. Could there be other features that would provide the other benefits of type aliasing more safely?

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• Where to Start?

  - by freemann098

  my name is Chase. I've been programming for over 3 years now and I've made very little progress towards game development. I blame myself for it due to reasons. I have experience in many languages such as C++, C#, and Java. I have a little bit of knowledge in JavaScript/HTML and Python. My question is where to start on actually understanding jumping into game development. Whenever I watch game development tutorials it mostly makes sense until points of things like OpenGL or advanced topics that make no sense at all. An example is something like glOrhho Matrix or whatever. Videos either don't explain things like this or they're not explained very well. Do I not know enough basics? I find myself always copying code from a video but understanding very little of it. It's like i'm memorizing things I don't understand which makes it hard to program at all. If I were to want to get to the point where I could write my own game engine or just a game by myself in general in C++ using at the most documentation how would I start at mastering to that level. Should I learn C first, or get really good at basics in general with C++. I know there is a similar posted question on this site but it's not the same due to the fact the person asking the question has a well knowledge level in programming. I'm stuck in a loop of learning the same things but if I go farther I don't understand. I'm stuck in the same spot and need to make progress.

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• Uses of persistent data structures in non-functional languages

  - by Ray Toal

  Languages that are purely functional or near-purely functional benefit from persistent data structures because they are immutable and fit well with the stateless style of functional programming. But from time to time we see libraries of persistent data structures for (state-based, OOP) languages like Java. A claim often heard in favor of persistent data structures is that because they are immutable, they are thread-safe. However, the reason that persistent data structures are thread-safe is that if one thread were to "add" an element to a persistent collection, the operation returns a new collection like the original but with the element added. Other threads therefore see the original collection. The two collections share a lot of internal state, of course -- that's why these persistent structures are efficient. But since different threads see different states of data, it would seem that persistent data structures are not in themselves sufficient to handle scenarios where one thread makes a change that is visible to other threads. For this, it seems we must use devices such as atoms, references, software transactional memory, or even classic locks and synchronization mechanisms. Why then, is the immutability of PDSs touted as something beneficial for "thread safety"? Are there any real examples where PDSs help in synchronization, or solving concurrency problems? Or are PDSs simply a way to provide a stateless interface to an object in support of a functional programming style?

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• What's the proper term for a function inverse to a constructor - to unwrap a value from a data type?

  - by Petr Pudlák

  Edit: I'm rephrasing the question a bit. Apparently I caused some confusion because I didn't realize that the term destructor is used in OOP for something quite different - it's a function invoked when an object is being destroyed. In functional programming we (try to) avoid mutable state so there is no such equivalent to it. (I added the proper tag to the question.) Instead, I've seen that the record field for unwrapping a value (especially for single-valued data types such as newtypes) is sometimes called destructor or perhaps deconstructor. For example, let's have (in Haskell): newtype Wrap = Wrap { unwrap :: Int } Here Wrap is the constructor and unwrap is what? The questions are: How do we call unwrap in functional programming? Deconstructor? Destructor? Or by some other term? And to clarify, is this/other terminology applicable to other functional languages, or is it used just in the Haskell? Perhaps also, is there any terminology for this in general, in non-functional languages? I've seen both terms, for example: ... Most often, one supplies smart constructors and destructors for these to ease working with them. ... at Haskell wiki, or ... The general theme here is to fuse constructor - deconstructor pairs like ... at Haskell wikibook (here it's probably meant in a bit more general sense), or newtype DList a = DL { unDL :: [a] -> [a] } The unDL function is our deconstructor, which removes the DL constructor. ... in The Real World Haskell.

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• How do I get away from PHP in the web industry?

  - by Kurtis

  I'm just looking for some tips on getting away from using PHP for web development. I'm self-employed but it seems like all of the work I find deals with PHP. I'm not complaining about the work -- just the poor choice of a language that is incredibly popular. I'd love to do my web development in Python, Perl, C#, or even a fun and fancy functional language. There's the old saying that you don't tell a carpenter what kind of a hammer to use. At the same time, you do tell them what kind of material to build your house out of and how much you're willing to spend. The problem I am running in to is that I don't know how to get out of this spiral. I can't just turn down work because then I wouldn't have any. I really don't want to go work for another company -- and even if I did, I'd probably still be stuck using something I don't enjoy. I'm hoping someone has "been there" before and might have some good ideas on how to get out of this situation. Thanks!

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• What are some techniques I can use to refactor Object Oriented code into Functional code?

  - by tieTYT

  I've spent about 20-40 hours developing part of a game using JavaScript and HTML5 canvas. When I started I had no idea what I was doing. So it started as a proof of concept and is coming along nicely now, but it has no automated tests. The game is starting to become complex enough that it could benefit from some automated testing, but it seems tough to do because the code depends on mutating global state. I'd like to refactor the whole thing using Underscore.js, a functional programming library for JavaScript. Part of me thinks I should just start from scratch using a Functional Programming style and testing. But, I think refactoring the imperative code into declarative code might be a better learning experience and a safer way to get to my current state of functionality. Problem is, I know what I want my code to look like in the end, but I don't know how to turn my current code into it. I'm hoping some people here could give me some tips a la the Refactoring book and Working Effectively With Legacy Code. For example, as a first step I'm thinking about "banning" global state. Take every function that uses a global variable and pass it in as a parameter instead. Next step may be to "ban" mutation, and to always return a new object. Any advice would be appreciated. I've never taken OO code and refactored it into Functional code before.

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• What are some ways to separate game logic from animations and the draw loop?

  - by TMV

  I have only previously made flash games, using MovieClips and such to separate out my animations from my game logic. Now I am getting into trying my hand at making a game for Android, but the game programming theory around separating these things still confuses me. I come from a background of developing non game web applications so I am versed in more MVC like patterns and am stuck in that mindset as I approach game programming. I want to do things like abstract my game by having, for example, a game board class that contains the data for a grid of tiles with instances of a tile class that each contain properties. I can give my draw loop access to this and have it draw the game board based on the properties of each tile on the game board, but I don't understand where exactly animation should go. As far as I can tell, animation sort of sits between the abstracted game logic (model) and the draw loop (view). With my MVC mindset, it's frustrating trying to decide where animation is actually supposed to go. It would have quite a bit of data associated with it like a model, but seemingly needs to be very closely coupled with the draw loop in order to have things like frame independent animation. How can I break out of this mindset and start thinking about patterns that make more sense for games?

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• Are specific types still necessary?

  - by MKO

  One thing that occurred to me the other day, are specific types still necessary or a legacy that is holding us back. What I mean is: do we really need short, int, long, bigint etc etc. I understand the reasoning, variables/objects are kept in memory, memory needs to be allocated and therefore we need to know how big a variable can be. But really, shouldn't a modern programming language be able to handle "adaptive types", ie, if something is only ever allocated in the shortint range it uses fewer bytes, and if something is suddenly allocated a very big number the memory is allocated accordinly for that particular instance. Float, real and double's are a bit trickier since the type depends on what precision you need. Strings should however be able to take upp less memory in many instances (in .Net) where mostly ascii is used buth strings always take up double the memory because of unicode encoding. One argument for specific types might be that it's part of the specification, ie for example a variable should not be able to be bigger than a certain value so we set it to shortint. But why not have type constraints instead? It would be much more flexible and powerful to be able to set permissible ranges and values on variables (and properties). I realize the immense problem in revamping the type architecture since it's so tightly integrated with underlying hardware and things like serialization might become tricky indeed. But from a programming perspective it should be great no?

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• Google Currency Convertor JSON API

  - by Gopinath

  There are many live currency conversion services available on the web and the popular one’s among them are – Google, Yahoo, MSN & XE. Among all these four Google is the developer’s darling and it provides a simple JSON API that can be integrated in your applications.  http://www.google.com/ig/calculator?hl=en&q=1USD=?INR Using the API is very simple and it takes two parameters as input. The first parameter “hl” is the language code in which you want output. The second parameter “q” is the conversion query in the format <number><from currency code>=?<to currency code>. In the URL give above the query requests for conversion of 1 USD in INR. JSON output for the above query would be  similar to {lhs: "1 U.S. dollar",rhs: "54.4602984 Indian rupees",error: "",icc: true} Examples: 100 USD in INR  http://www.google.com/ig/calculator?hl=en&q=100USD=?INR Example 2: 1 GBP in INR http://www.google.com/ig/calculator?hl=en&q=1GBP=?INR Example 3: 1 USD in INR, output the data in French language http://www.google.com/ig/calculator?hl=fr&q=1USD=?INR   This is an undocumented service and expect changes at any time. But as long as it works, you got a programmatic way to convert currencies.

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