Search Results

Search found 17731 results on 710 pages for 'programming practices'.

Page 95/710 | < Previous Page | 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102  | Next Page >

• 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.

  Read the article

• Is there a language more general than Lisp?

  - by Jon Purdy

  I've been programming for a long time, and writing in Lisp (well, mostly Scheme) for a little less. My experience in these languages (and other functional languages) has informed my ability to write clean code even with less powerful tools. Lisp-family languages have lovely facilities for implementing every abstraction in common use: S-expressions generalise structure. Macros generalise syntax. Continuations generalise flow control. But I'm dissatisfied. Somehow, I want more. Is there a language that's more general? More powerful? As great as Lisp is, I find it hard to believe no one has come up with anything (dare I say) better. I'm well aware that ordinarily a question like this ought to be closed for its argumentative nature. But there seems to be a broad consensus that Lisp represents the theoretical pinnacle of programming language design. I simply refuse to accept that without some kind of proof. Which I guess amounts to questioning whether the lambda calculus is in fact the ideal abstraction of computation.

  Read the article

• 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?

  Read the article

• Generalist Languages: Dying or Alive and Well?

  - by dsimcha

  Around here, it seems like there's somewhat of a consensus that generalist programming languages (that try to be good at everything, support multiple paradigms, support both very high- and very low-level programming), etc. are a bad idea, and that it's better to pick the right tool for the job and use lots of different languages. I see three major areas where this is flawed: Interfacing multiple languages is always at least a source of friction and is sometimes practically impossible. How severe a problem this is depends on how fine-grained the interfacing is. Near the boundary between the two languages, though, you're basically limited to the intersection of their features, and you have to care about things like binary interfaces that you usually wouldn't. Passing complex data structures (i.e. not just primitives and arrays of primitives) between languages is almost always a hassle. Furthermore, shifting between different syntaxes, different conventions, etc. can be confusing and annoying, though this is a fairly minor complaint. Requirements are never set in stone. I hate picking a language thinking it's the right tool for the job, then realizing that, when some new requirement surfaces, it's actually a terrible choice for that requirement. This has happened to me several times before, usually when working with languages that are very slow, very domain specific and/or has very poor concurrency/parallelism support. When you program in a language for a while, you start to build up a personal toolbox of small utility functions/classes/programs. The value of these goes drastically down if you're forced to use a different language than the one you've accumulated all this code in. What am I missing here? Why shouldn't more focus be placed on generalist languages? Are generalist languages as a category dying or alive and well?

  Read the article

• 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

  Read the article

• Benefits of classic OOP over Go-like language

  - by tylerl

  I've been thinking a lot about language design and what elements would be necessary for an "ideal" programming language, and studying Google's Go has led me to question a lot of otherwise common knowledge. Specifically, Go seems to have all of the interesting benefits from object oriented programming without actually having any of the structure of an object oriented language. There are no classes, only structures; there is no class/structure inheritance -- only structure embedding. There aren't any hierarchies, no parent classes, no explicit interface implementations. Instead, type casting rules are based on a loose system similar to duck-typing, such that if a struct implements the necessary elements of a "Reader" or a "Request" or an "Encoding", then you can cast it and use it as one. Does such a system obsolete the concept of OOP? Or is there something about OOP as implemented in C++ and Java and C# that is inherently more capable, more maintainable, somehow more powerful that you have to give up when moving to a language like Go? What benefit do you have to give up to gain the simplicity that this new paradigm represents?

  Read the article

• What can be done against language inertia?

  - by gerrit

  Often, projects use programming language X, but would use programming language Y if they were started from scratch. For example, big numerical models may be written entirely in Fortran. Whereas this might be a reasonable choice for the components that need to run fast (alternative would be C or C++), it might be a poor choice for components that either do not need to run fast (such as things dealing with human input or simple visualisations), or where runtime is not the limiting factor (such as I/O, particularly when from the network). Another example may be when a project is built using a propriety language (such as Matlab; no, FOSS clones are not good enough) and was started at a time when FOSS alternatives were not viable, but ten years later, they are; and it would be beneficial to migrate. However, due to language inertia, a migration does not happen. Code that works should not be touched, porting code is a time-consuming, expensive process, and programmers are familiar in language X but not necessarily in language Y. Still, in the long term, a migration would likely be beneficial. Can anything be done to mitigate the problems associated with language inertia? Are there any notable examples of big projects that have successfully overcome this problem? Or is a project bound to stick forever with the initial choices?

  Read the article

• 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?

  Read the article

• 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.

  Read the article

• 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.

  Read the article

• When can you call yourself good at language X?

  - by SoulBeaver

  This goes back to a conversation I've had with my girlfriend. I tried to tell her that I simply don't feel adequate enough in my programming language (C++) to call myself good. She then asked me, "Well, when do you consider yourself good enough?" That's an interesting question. I didn't know what to tell her. So I'm asking you. For any programming language, framework or the like, when do you reach a point were you sit back, look at what you've done and say, "Hey, I'm actually pretty good at this."? How do you define "good" so that you can tell others, honestly, "Yeah, I'm good at X". Additionally, do you reach these conclusions by comparing what others can do? Additional Info I have read the canonical paper on how it takes ten-thousand hours before you are an expert on the field. (Props to anybody that knows what this paper is called again) I have also read various articles from Coding Horror about interviewing people. Some people, it was said, "Cannot function outside of a framework." So they may be "good" for that framework, but not otherwise in the language. Is this true?

  Read the article

• 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?

  Read the article

• 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.

  Read the article

• 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?

  Read the article

• Spending a good fortune on a certificate holding Scrum Master or a Veteran XP coach?

  - by ashy_32bit

  There is a very prestigious company that delivers a well-sold software about financial systems. It has more that 20 years of history, and is staffed with about 20 programmers and much larger number of managerial staff. Dissatisfied customers have reported strange bugs and no one has a clue what is wrong, hard to read code, and customization is prohibitively expensive. In a word, the software is rotten. The company decided to spend a fortune and found the Agile thing as the remedy but they are stuck about what it is they need most urgently. Is it about the process or the developers or both? The challenge breaks down to the following options: They can hire a certificate holding Scrum Master to teach them Scrum. When asked about the value of doing it, the SM responded: "I will prepare them to embrace Agile and only then they can go Agile and save the product". They can as well hire a veteran XP coach. When posed with the same question he responded : "The most urgent problem is with the programmers and not the management, XP will save the product from rot and only then Scrum will make sense" Developers are far from capable of doing agile programming practices at the moment. No unit tests, no pair programmings, no CI (huh? what is it?) ... you get the idea. Some say they would be far better trying to improve their programming first (hire option 2) and then go with the process. Many say quite the opposite. Any insights ?

  Read the article

• Laser range finder, what language to use? Beginner advice

  - by DrOnline

  I hope this is the right place. I am a programming beginner, and I want to make a laser range finder, and I need advice about how to proceed etc. In a few weeks I will get a lot of dirt cheap 3-5V lasers and some cheap usb webcams. I will point the laser and webcam in parallel, and somehow use trigonometry and programming to determined distance. I have seen online that others made done it this way, I have purposefully not looked at the details too much because I want to develop it on my own, and learn, but I know the general outline. I have a general idea of how to proceed. The program loads in a picture from the webcam, and I dunno how images work really, but I imagine there is a format that is basically an array of RGB values.. is this right? I will load in the red values, and find the most red one. I know the height difference between the laser and the cam. I know the center dot in the image, I know the redmost dot. I'm sure there's some way to figure out some range there. TO THE POINT: 1) Is my reasoning sound thus far, especially in terms of image analysis? I don't need complete solutions, just general points 2) What I need to figure out, is what platform to use. I have an arduino... apparently, I've read it's too weak to process images. Read that online. I know some C I know some Python I have Matlab. Which is the best option? I do not need high sampling rates, I have not decided on whether it should be automated or whether I should make a GUI with a button to press for samples. I will keep it simple and expand I think. I also do not need it to be super accurate, I'm just having fun here. Advice!

  Read the article

• Open source C# projects that have high code quality?

  - by Simucal

  Question: What are some open source C# projects I can download that implement many best-practices and have a relatively high code quality? Please accompany your answer with some of the reasons you consider the code is of high quality. Suggestions so far: SharpDevelop NHibernate Boo Rhino Mocks Mono Paint.NET - Not Open Source ASP.NET MVC Framework .Net Framework Source Code The Weekly Source Code (Scott Hanselman's Series) Microsoft's Pattern and Practices

  Read the article

• Best deployment strategy for Python google app engine

  - by sushant

  I wonder if there are any best practices/patterns for deploying python apps on Google app engine specifically Django. The best practice should be combination of existing best practices viz. Fabric, Paver, Buildout etc. Also please share best practice patterns for developing (I could not get virtualenv running with Django and Django App engine helper)

  Read the article

• Best way to handle global state

  - by David

  Hi there, I was wondering if anyone could offer some advice on 'best practices' for using global state in a web application - specifically PHP, although im looking for generic best practices i.e. design patterns etc. At the moment I just use a static class, calling it Configs. I suppose this is similar to using the registry pattern but surely there is a more elegant way of handling global data within an application - i just cant think of a better way though.

  Read the article

• DonXml does WCF in NYC

  - by gsusx

  Tomorrow is WCF day in New York city!!!!! My good friend and Tellago's CTO Don Demsak will be doing a session WCF Data and RIA Services at the WCF fire-starter event to be hosted at the Microsoft offices in New York city. Don has a encyclopedic knowledge of both technologies and will be sharing lots of best practices learned from applying these technologies in large service oriented environments. In addition to Don, my crazy Cuban friend Miguel Castro will also be presenting three sessions at the...(read more)

  Read the article

• Using the right folder for the right job. Article link, please?

  - by Droogans

  There are specific folders designed for specific tasks. /var/www holds your web sites, /usr/bin contains files to run your applications...yet I still find myself putting nearly all of my work in ~. Is it possible to overuse my home directory? Will it come back to haunt me? Anyone have a good link to an article of best practices for organizing your files so that they are placed in their "correct" place? Is there even such a thing in Linux? I am referring specifically to user-generated content. I do not compile applications from source, I use apt-get for those tasks. This article has a great introduction to what I'm looking for. Table 3-2, "Subdirectories of the root directory" is the sort of thing I'm looking for, but with more details/examples.

  Read the article

• What is your IT-department to staff ratio?

  - by Bart Silverstrim

  This is a topic that may be rather political but it related to system administration still...how many people do you have supporting your users in your IT department? We have three people supporting something near 1500 systems and around 2400 people and a recent question was raised about why we have long times to get systems replaced, repaired, work orders fulfilled, etc. along with the system admin duties of maintaining the servers (mail, proxy, filters, VOIP, wireless, backup, etc.) Does anyone have numbers on what the "best practices" average is of support people to employees in an organization? EDIT:...from some of the answers that are appearing I'm starting to feel depressed...

  Read the article

• Information System for an Academic Institution

  - by birukw

  Hi, The University I am working for is undergoing a major renovation of the ICT system. The team currently undertaking the task is designing a centralized system with the intent of providing most (if not all) services of the institution electronically. Most of us are academicians with little practical experience. The questions we need answers for are What are the systems (preferably free, as in Beer, and/or open) and best-practices in use in other academic institutions? What are the experiences of people administering academic ICT systems? What are the overheads of attempting to provide services through an intranet cloud (like UEC) for us (a medium-sized academic institution, in a third-world country)? We would very much appreciate it if you could give us your take on the situtation. Thanks

  Read the article

• Oracle RAC interconnect in a Dell M1000e Blade Enclosure

  - by Antitribu

  We are looking at a Dell M1000e enclosure and appropriate Blades with 4 NICs each. We are planning on running Linux/Oracle 11g RAC on two blades, storage will be handled on an iSCSI SAN for which two NICs (via passthrough) will be connected leaving us with two NICs (via blade centre switches). We would like to have an interconnect (obviously) , an external IP and an internal IP. Would best practice be to: bond the remaining two interfaces and VLAN as appropriate to provide three virtual interfaces? run the interconnect on one interface and VLAN the external/internal interfaces? purchase a blade with more NICs as the above is a terrible idea? Another option? Please feel free to point out the blindingly obvious or to relevant documentation on support.oracle. I am specifically interested in supported configurations and best practices. Thanks!

  Read the article

• University Assignment: Datacenter/Networking Infrastructure for Hosting Company [closed]

  - by TCB13

  My university assigned me to theorizing a data center for an Web Hosting company. The company should provide the following services: Shared WebHosting; Dedicated Servers; VPS (Virtual Private Server); The bandwith (as resquested) is limited to 10 Gbps. Is there any good book / other info I can read (max 100 pages) about how to design a good data center for hosting, what are the best practices and what should be done from a (logical) network perspective, what security policies should be implemented and how the data center should be built (physically)? Thank you ;)

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102  | Next Page >