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• What is the value in hiding the details through abstractions? Isn't there value in transparency?

  - by user606723

  Background I am not a big fan of abstraction. I will admit that one can benefit from adaptability, portability and re-usability of interfaces etc. There is real benefit there, and I don't wish to question that, so let's ignore it. There is the other major "benefit" of abstraction, which is to hide implementation logic and details from users of this abstraction. The argument is that you don't need to know the details, and that one should concentrate on their own logic at this point. Makes sense in theory. However, whenever I've been maintaining large enterprise applications, I always need to know more details. It becomes a huge hassle digging deeper and deeper into the abstraction at every turn just to find out exactly what something does; i.e. having to do "open declaration" about 12 times before finding the stored procedure used. This 'hide the details' mentality seems to just get in the way. I'm always wishing for more transparent interfaces and less abstraction. I can read high level source code and know what it does, but I'll never know how it does it, when how it does it, is what I really need to know. What's going on here? Has every system I've ever worked on just been badly designed (from this perspective at least)? My philosophy When I develop software, I feel like I try to follow a philosophy I feel is closely related to the ArchLinux philosophy: Arch Linux retains the inherent complexities of a GNU/Linux system, while keeping them well organized and transparent. Arch Linux developers and users believe that trying to hide the complexities of a system actually results in an even more complex system, and is therefore to be avoided. And therefore, I never try to hide complexity of my software behind abstraction layers. I try to abuse abstraction, not become a slave to it. Question at heart Is there real value in hiding the details? Aren't we sacrificing transparency? Isn't this transparency valuable?

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• Best practice with branching source code and application lifecycle

  - by Toni Frankola

  We are a small ISV shop and we usually ship a new version of our products every month. We use Subversion as our code repository and Visual Studio 2010 as our IDE. I am aware a lot of people are advocating Mercurial and other distributed source control systems but at this point I do not see how we could benefit from these, but I might be wrong. Our main problem is how to keep branches and main trunk in sync. Here is how we do things today: Release new version (automatically create a tag in Subversion) Continue working on the main trunk that will be released next month And the cycle repeats every month and works perfectly. The problem arises when an urgent service release needs to be released. We cannot release it from the main trunk (2) as it is under heavy development and it is not stable enough to be released urgently. In such case we do the following: Create a branch from the tag we created in step (1) Bug fix Test and release Push the change back to main trunk (if applicable) Our biggest problem is merging these two (branch with main). In most cases we cannot rely on automatic merging because e.g.: a lot of changes has been made to main trunk merging complex files (like Visual Studio XML files etc.) does not work very well another developer / team made changes you do not understand and you cannot just merge it So what you think is the best practice to keep these two different versions (branch and main) in sync. What do you do?

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• Computer Science Programming Certificate vs. Computer Science Degree?

  - by Jess

  I'm kind of in a tough spot. My current living conditions require that I work a full-time job while attending school. I've attended a UC in the past but had to withdraw my junior year due to financial issues at home. I currently work an entry-level IT corp job but I'm looking to further my salary/skills by getting a degree, or a programming certificate like this one: http://www.lavc.edu/voced1/CSITCertCSP/CSITCertFrameCSP.htm Herein lies the problem. I prefer getting a CS degree from an accredited university but I looked at the schedules for classes and it is impossible to work around my current 40/hr work week. There are random morning classes, with the occasional evening class, but the times get even more construed as I move my way up to the upper divisions. So what I guess I'm trying to get at is, can anyone lay out the pros and cons of obtaining a certificate vs. the degree (besides obvious points like the latter being 100x better)? I'm aware that having a degree is always going to be a better route, but...is the programming certificate useless? Should I not even bother?

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• Is it a "pattern smell" to put getters like "FullName" or "FormattedPhoneNumber" in your model?

  - by DanM

  I'm working on an ASP.NET MVC app, and I've been getting into the habit of putting what seem like helpful and convenient getters into my model/entity classes. For example: public class Member { public int Id { get; set; } public string FirstName { get; set; } public string LastName { get; set; } public string PhoneNumber { get; set; } public string FullName { get { return FirstName + " " + LastName; } } public string FormattedPhoneNumber { get { return "(" + PhoneNumber.Substring(0, 3) + ") " + PhoneNumber.Substring(3, 3) + "-" + PhoneNumber.Substring(6); } } } I'm wondering people think about the FullName and FormattedPhoneNumber getters. They make it very easy to create standardized data formats throughout the app, and they seem to save a lot of repeated code, but it could definitely be argued that data format is something that should be handled in mapping from model to view-model. In fact, I was originally applying these data formats in my service layer where I do my mapping, but it was becoming a burden to constantly have to write formatters then apply them in many different places. E.g., I use "Full Name" in most views, and having to type something like model.FullName = MappingUtilities.GetFullName(entity.FirstName, entity.LastName); all over the place seemed a lot less elegant than just typing model.FullName = entity.FullName (or, if you use something like AutoMapper, potentially not typing anything at all). So, where do you draw the line when it comes to data formatting. Is it "okay" to do data formatting in your model or is that a "pattern smell"? Note: I definitely do not have any html in my model. I use html helpers for that. I'm strictly talking about formatting or combining data (and especially data that is frequently used).

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• Annotate source code with diagrams as comments

  - by Steven Lu

  I write a lot of (primarily c++ and javascript) code that touches upon computational geometry and graphics and those kinds of topics, so I have found that visual diagrams have been an indispensable part of the process of solving problems. I have determined just now that "oh, wouldn't it just be fantastic if I could somehow attach a hand-drawn diagram to a piece of code as a comment", and this would allow me to come back to something I worked on, days, weeks, months earlier and far more quickly re-grok my algorithms. As a visual learner, I feel like this has the potential to improve my productivity with almost every type of programming because simple diagrams can help with understanding and reasoning about any type of non-trivial data structure. Graphs for example. During graph theory class at university I had only ever been able to truly comprehend the graph relationships that I could actually draw diagrammatical representations of. So... No IDE to my knowledge lets you save a picture as a comment to code. My thinking was that I or someone else could come up with some reasonably easy-to-use tool that can convert an image into a base64 binary string which I can then insert into my code. If the conversion/insertion process can be streamlined enough it would allow a far better connection between the diagram and the actual code, so I no longer need to chronographically search through my notebooks. Even more awesome: plugins for the IDEs to automatically parse out and display the image. There is absolutely nothing difficult about this from a theoretical point of view. My guess is that it would take some extra time for me to actually figure out how to extend my favorite IDEs and maintain these plugins, so I'd be totally happy with a sort of code post-processor which would do the same parsing out and rendering of the images and show them side by side with the code, inside of a browser or something. Since I'm a javascript programmer by trade. What do people think? Would anyone pay for this? I would.

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• Are books on programming hard to understand?

  - by DarkEnergy

  I've been reading books that are extremely daunting. Accelerated C++ is by far one of the books -- that I haven't finished. I plan too, but that's another story. When reading a programming book, do you find yourself re reading a lot of the paragraphs? Sometimes it takes me like an hour to read 20 pages out of a book. Sometimes they become so daunting that it takes me all day to finish a single chapter. I think having these as e-books makes them even harder to read sometimes, since I'm so used to looking down to read a book or just looking at tangible paper. IDK, just wanting to know if reading these books becomes extremely hard, and do you find yourself rereading the most simplest paragraphs 2-3 times just to get the meaning of it because the previous paragraph left your brain hurting? http://www.it-career-coach.net/2007/03/04/are-computer-programming-books-hard-to-study/ here is a article i read on something similar to this. edit sometimes I find myself reading a whole page... then I look up and say 'wth did I just read'... I could finish a chapter in 30 minutes to an hour and feel this way too...

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• Can You Have "Empty" Abstract/Classes?

  - by ShrimpCrackers

  Of course you can, I'm just wondering if it's rational to design in such a way. I'm making a breakout clone and was doing some class design. I wanted to use inheritance, even though I don't have to, to apply what I've learned in C++. I was thinking about class design and came up with something like this: GameObject - base class (consists of data members like x and y offsets, and a vector of SDL_Surface* MovableObject : GameObject - abstract class + derived class of GameObject (one method void move() = 0; ) NonMovableObject : GameObject - empty class...no methods or data members other than constructor and destructor(at least for now?). Later I was planning to derive a class from NonMovableObject, like Tileset : NonMovableObject. I was just wondering if "empty" abstract classes or just empty classes are often used...I notice that the way I'm doing this, I'm just creating the class NonMovableObject just for sake of categorization. I know I'm overthinking things just to make a breakout clone, but my focus is less on the game and more on using inheritance and designing some sort of game framework.

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• Python class representation under the hood

  - by decentralised

  OK, here is a simple Python class: class AddSomething(object): __metaclass__ = MyMetaClass x = 10 def __init__(self, a): self.a = a def add(self, a, b): return a + b We have specified a metaclass, and that means we could write something like this: class MyMetaClass(type): def __init__(cls, name, bases, cdict): # do something with the class Now, the cdict holds a representation of AddSomething: AddSomething = type('AddSomething', (object,), {'x' : 10, '__init__': __init__, 'add': add}) So my question is simple, are all Python classes represented in this second format internally? If not, how are they represented? EDIT - Python 2.7

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• Mobile Apps for Hospitals?

  - by Joey Green

  I currently work for a pretty large hospital and have been dabbling in iPhone development for a couple years. The CEO is wanting to get together a group to see what mobile technology we could create. I was contacted to be the main developer. I wanted to gather some ideas of what kind of mobile apps people have seen deployed in hospitals. Not necessarily medical apps that you can get on the app store, but rather apps built specifically for a hospital. Any ideas? If this is not the appropriate forum for a question like this, can someone point me to a forum where it would be appropriate?

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• Difference between extensible programming and extendible programming?

  - by loudandclear

  What exactly is the different between "extensible programming" and "extendible programming?" Wikipedia states the following: The Lisp language community remained separate from the extensible language community, apparently because, as one researcher observed, any programming language in which programs and data are essentially interchangeable can be regarded as an extendible [sic] language. ... this can be seen very easily from the fact that Lisp has been used as an extendible language for years. If I'm understanding this correctly, it says "Lisp is extendible implies Lisp is not extensible". So what do these two terms mean, and how do they differ?

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• Diagram that could explain a state machine's code?

  - by Incognito

  We have a lot of concepts in making diagrams like UML and flowcharting or just making up whatever boxes-and-arrows combination works at the time, but I'm looking at doing a visual diagram on something that's actually really complex. State machines like those that parse HTML or regular expressions tend to be very long and complicated bits of code. For example, this is the stateLoop for FireFox 9 beta. It's actually generated by another file, but this is the code that runs. How can I diagram something with the complexity of this in a way that explains flow of the code without taking it to a level where I draw every single line-of-code into it's own box on a flowchart? I don't want to draw "Invoke loop, then return" but I don't want to explain every last detail. What kind of graph is suitable to do this? Is there already something out there similar to this? Just an example of how to do this without going overboard in complexity or too-high-level is really what I want. If you don't feel like looking at the code, basically it's 70 different state flags that could occur, inside an infinite loop that exists to a label based on some conditions, each flag has it's own infinite loop that exists to a label somewhere, and each of those loops has checks for different types of chars, which then runs off into various other methods.

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• Cross-platform desktop programming: C++ vs. Python

  - by John Wells

  Alright, to start off, I have experience as an amateur Obj-C/Cocoa and Ruby w/Rails programmer. These are great, but they aren't really helpful for writing cross-platform applications (hopefully GNUStep will one day be complete enough for the first to be multi platform, but that day is not today). C++, from what I can gather, is extremely powerful but also a huge, ugly behemoth that can take half a decade or more to master. I've also read that you can very easily not only shoot yourself in the foot, but blow your entire leg off with it since memory management is all manual. Obviously, this is all quite intimidating. Is it correct? Python seems to provide most of the power of C++ and is much easier to pick up at the cost of speed. How big is this sacrifice? Is it meaningful or can it be ignored? Which will have me writing fast, stable, highly reliable applications in a reasonable amount of time? Also, is it better to use Qt for your UI or instead maintain separate, native front ends for each platform? EDIT: For extra clarity, there are two types applications I want to write: one is an extremely friendly and convenient database frontend and the other, which no doubt will come much later on, is a 3D world editor.

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• Good resources for learning Rails?

  - by Bobby Tables

  I just finished working through Peter Cooper's "Beginning Ruby". So now I've got a reasonable grounding in the Ruby language and would like to move onto learning Rails. This question's answers give some good pointers, but I'd like to hear some specific reviews of books and online materials. I generally learn best by working through books with good practical/technical examples AND some passive reading content that breaks up the study between practical and reading sessions (this is what made "Beginning Ruby" great for me), but I'm worried that RoR is evolving fast and that any printed book I order might be obsolete by the time I get it and work through it. Is this a fair worry? Or can anyone recommend a good Rails 3 book that should be up to date at least for the next year or so? Also, I had a brief look at some of the online resources from the other questions, and Rails for Zombies seems to get a lot of praise. Has anyone here actually used it as their introductory guide to Rails? Basically I'd like to hear first-hand accounts of people who went through this "Ruby-to-Rails" learning phase recently and which materials were useful to you.

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• Dependency Injection/IoC container practices when writing frameworks

  - by Dave Hillier

  I've used various IoC containers (Castle.Windsor, Autofac, MEF, etc) for .Net in a number of projects. I have found they tend to encourage a number of bad practices. Are there any established practices for IoC container use, particularly when providing a platform/framework? My aim as a framework writer is to make code as simple and as easy to use as possible. I'd rather write one line of code to construct an object than ten or even just two. For example, a couple of code smells that I've noticed and don't have good suggestions to: Large number of parameters (5) for constructors. Creating services tends to be complex; all of the dependencies are injected via the constructor - despite the fact that the components are rarely optional (except for maybe in testing). Lack of private and internal classes; this one may be a specific limitation of using C# and Silverlight, but I'm interested in how it is solved. It's difficult to tell what a frameworks interface is if all the classes are public; it allows me access to private parts that I probably shouldnt touch. Coupling the object lifecycle to the IoC container. It is often difficult to manually construct the dependencies required to create objects. Object lifecycle is too often managed by the IoC framework. I've seen projects where most classes are registered as Singletons. You get a lack of explicit control and are also forced to manage the internals (it relates to the above point, all classes are public and you have to inject them). For example, .Net framework has many static methods. such as, DateTime.UtcNow. Many times I have seen this wrapped and injected as a construction parameter. Depending on concrete implementation makes my code hard to test. Injecting a dependency makes my code hard to use - particularly if the class has many parameters. How do I provide both a testable interface, as well as one that is easy to use? What are the best practices?

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• Databinding to an Entity Framework in WPF

  - by King Chan

  Is it good to use databinding to Entity Framework's Entity in WPF? I created a singleton entity framework context: To have only one connection and it won't open and close all the time. So I can pass the Entity around to any class, and can modify the Entity and make changes to the database. All ViewModels getting the entity out from the same Context and databinding to the View saves me time from mapping new object, but now I imagine there is problem in not using the newest Context: A ViewModel databinding to a Entity, then someone else updated the data. The ViewModel will still display the old data, because the Context is never being dispose to refresh. I always create new Context and then dispose of it. If I want to pass the Entity around, then there will be conflicts between Context and Entity. What is the suggested way of doing this ?

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• Using ASP.NET C# and Javascript

  - by ctck

  I'm looking for the most efficient / standardized way of passing data between client javascript code and C# code behind in an ASP.NET application. Currently ive been using the following methods to achieve this but they all feel a bit like a fudge. The way i pass data from javascript to the C# code behind is by setting hidden asp variables and triggering a postback <asp:HiddenField ID="RandomList" runat="server" /> function SetDataField(data) { document.getElementById('<%=RandomList.ClientID%>').value = data; } Then in C# code i collect the list protected void GetData(object sender, EventArgs e) { var _list = RandomList.value; } Going back the other way i often use either scriptmanager to register a function and pass it data during Page_Load: ScriptManager.RegisterStartupScript(this.GetType(), "Set","get("Test();",true); or i add attributes to controls before a post back or during Initialization / pre rendering stages: Btn.Attributes.Add("onclick", "DisplayMessage("Hello");"); These methods have served me well and do the job. However they just dont feel complete. Is there a more standardized way of passing data between client side markup / javascript and backend code. Ive seen some posts like this one: Injecting JavaScrip : StackOverflow that describe HtmlElement class. Is this something is should look into? Thanks everyone for your time.

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• Beyond Syntax Highlighting - What other code representations are possible today?

  - by Mathieu Hélie

  Despite GUI applications having been around for 30ish years, software is still written as lines of text instructions, for various valid reasons. But we've also found that manipulating these text instructions is mind-blowingly difficult unless we apply a layer of coloring on different words to represent their syntax, thus allowing us to quickly parse through these text files without having to read the whole words. But besides the Sublime Text minimap feature, I've yet to see any innovation in visual representation of code since colors came around on CRT monitors. I can think of one obviously essential representation that modern graphics technology allows: visual hierarchies for nested structures. If we make nested text slightly smaller than its outer context, and zoom on it when the cursor is focused on the line, then we will be able to browse huge files of nested statements very quickly. This becomes even more essential as languages based on closures and anonymous functions become filled with deep statements. Has anyone attempted to implement this in a text editor? Do you know of any otherwise useful improvements in representing code text graphically?

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• How to become a better programmer in 2011?

  - by Anish Patel

  Not strictly a Stack Overflow thing, but I thought I'd get it out there and ask the question. What are you as a programmer going to do to improve in 2011? The things I am planning to do are as follows: Learn Functional Programming Write 100 blog posts Take a bunch of Microsoft exams (70-433, 70-511, 70-513, 70-515, 70-516, 70-518, 70-519) Contribute to an open source project Lets hope the motivation lasts all year!

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• Gui Batch program on USB

  - by Chris Okyen

  When I put my USB drive into a computer, I want autorun.inf to run a batch file that will have a win32/winform GUI windows interface to allow the user to select a program to run from the beginning similiar to like this: Please let me know if windows allows this without it being done programmatically. I know their are some automation programs that work by generating code based on what it records you do. But I don't knwo of any already built windows prompt like this, so I don't knwo how to record such an action.

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• scalablity of Scala over Java

  - by Marcus

  I read an article that says Scala handles concurrency better than Java. http://www.theserverside.com/feature/Solving-the-Scalability-Paradox-with-Scala-Clojure-and-Groovy ...the scalability limitation is confined specifically to the Java programming language itself, but it is not a limitation of the Java platform as a whole... The scalability issues with Java aren't a new revelation. In fact, plenty of work has been done to address these very issues, with two of the most successful projects being the programming languages named Scala and Clojure... ...Scala is finding ways around the problematic thread and locking paradigm of the Java language... How is this possible? Doesn't Scala use Java's core libraries which brings all the threading and locking issues from Java to Scala?

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• Confused about ASP.NET Ajax, jQuery and JavaScript

  - by Mr.Y

  Yesterday, I read couple of chapters on ASP.NET Ajax and jQuery from my ASP.NET 4 book and I found those frameworks pretty interesting and decide to learn more about them. Today, I borrowed some books from library on Ajax and JavaScript. It seems ASP.NET Ajax is different from Ajax and jQuery seems like the "new" JavaScript. Does it mean that I can skip JavaScript and learn jQuery directly? On the other hand, the non-ASP.NET Ajax book I borrowed seems to apply to the client side web programming only and looks quite different from what I learned from ASP.NET Ajax. If I'm an ASP.NET developer, I guess I should stick with ASP.NET Ajax instead of client side Ajax right? What about PHP? Is there a "PHP Ajax" similar to ASP.NET Ajax? It's not that I'm lazy to learn other tools, but I just want to focus on the right ones.

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• Python interview questions

  - by Andy

  I am going to interview within two weeks for an internship that would involve Python programming. Can anyone suggest what possible areas should I polish? I am looking for commonly asked stuff in interviews for Python openings. Apart from the fact that I have already been doing the language for over a year now, I fail to perceive what they can ask me. Like for a C or C++ interview, there are lots of questions ranging from reversing of strings to building linked lists, but for a Python interview, I am clueless. Personal experiences and/ or suggestions are welcomed.

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• How to turn on/off code modules?

  - by Safran Ali

  I am trying to run multiple sites using single code base and code base consist of the following module (i.e. classes) User module Q & A module Faq module and each class works on MVC pattern i.e. it consist of Entity class Helper class (i.e. static class) View (i.e. pages and controls) and let's say I have 2 sites site1.com and site2.com. And I am trying to achieve following functionality site1.com can have User, Q & A and Faq module up and running site2.com can have User and Q & A module live while Faq module is switched off but it can be turned-on if needed, so my query here is what is the best way to achieve such functionality Do I introduce a flag bit that I check on every page and control belonging to that module? It's more like CMS where you can turn on/off different features. I am trying to get my head around it, please provide me with an example or point out if I am taking the wrong approach.

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• Correct For Loop Design

  - by Yttrill

  What is the correct design for a for loop? Felix currently uses if len a > 0 do for var i in 0 upto len a - 1 do println a.[i]; done done which is inclusive of the upper bound. This is necessary to support the full range of values of a typical integer type. However the for loop shown does not support zero length arrays, hence the special test, nor will the subtraction of 1 work convincingly if the length of the array is equal to the number of integers. (I say convincingly because it may be that 0 - 1 = maxval: this is true in C for unsigned int, but are you sure it is true for unsigned char without thinking carefully about integral promotions?) The actual implementation of the for loop by my compiler does correctly handle 0 but this requires two tests to implement the loop: continue: if not (i <= bound) goto break body if i == bound goto break ++i goto continue break: Throw in the hand coded zero check in the array example and three tests are needed. If the loop were exclusive it would handle zero properly, avoiding the special test, but there'd be no way to express the upper bound of an array with maximum size. Note the C way of doing this: for(i=0; predicate(i); increment(i)) has the same problem. The predicate is tested after the increment, but the terminating increment is not universally valid! There is a general argument that a simple exclusive loop is enough: promote the index to a large type to prevent overflow, and assume no one will ever loop to the maximum value of this type.. but I'm not entirely convinced: if you promoted to C's size_t and looped from the second largest value to the largest you'd get an infinite loop!

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• How does key-based caching work?

  - by Dominic Santos

  I recently read an article on the 37Signals blog and I'm left wondering how it is that they get the cache key. It's all well and good having a cache key that includes the object's timestamp (this means that when you update the object the cache will be invalidated); but how do you then use the cache key in a template without causing a DB hit for the very object that you are trying to fetch from the cache. Specifically, how does this affect One to Many relations where you are rendering a Post's Comments for example. Example in Django: {% for comment in post.comments.all %} {% cache comment.pk comment.modified %} <p>{{ post.body }}</p> {% endcache %} {% endfor %} Is caching in Rails different to just requests to memcached for example (I know that they convert your cache key to something different). Do they also cache the cache key?

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