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  • Are there any strongly typed scripting languages?

    - by George Edison
    I am wondering if there are any strongly typed scripting languages. Python, JavaScript, etc. are great languages, but they are (to a certain degree) loosely typed. I am just wondering if anyone knows of any strongly typed scripting languages. And by scripting, I mean a language whose interpreter can be embedded in a C++ application.

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  • Is Polyglot programming important?

    - by Kb
    Trying to learn more about Polyglot programming. What is it exactly and is it important? Look like it is cross platform coding and interoperability across platforms... I found this article by Ted Neward (Thoughtworks) interesting.

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  • What is "elegant" code?

    - by Breton
    I see a lot of lip service and talk about the most "elegant" way to do this or that. I think if you spend enough time programming you begin to obtain a sort of intuitive feel for what it is we call "elegance". But I'm curious. Even if we can look at a bit of code, and say instinctively "That's elegant", or "That's messy", I wonder if any of us really understands what that means. Is there a precise definition for this "elegance" we keep referring to? If there is, what is it? Now, what I mean by a precise definition, is a series of statements which can be used to derive questions about a peice of code, or a program as a whole, and determine objectively, or as objectively as possible, whether that code is "elegant" or not. May I assert, that perhaps no such definition exists, and it's all just personal preference. In this case, I ask you a slightly different question: Is there a better word for "elegance", or a better set of attributes to use for judging code quality that is perhaps more objective than merely appealing to individual intuition and taste? Perhaps code quality is a matter of taste, and the answer to both of my questions is "no". But I can't help but feel that we could be doing better than just expressing wishy washy feelings about our code quality. For example, user interface design is something that to a broad range of people looks for all the world like a field of study that oughtta be 100% subjective matter of taste. But this is shockingly and brutally not the case, and there are in fact many objective measures that can be applied to a user interface to determine its quality. A series of tests could be written to give a definitive and repeatable score to user interface quality. (See GOMS, for instance). Now, okay. is Elegance simply "code quality" or is it something more? Is it something that can be measured? Or is it a matter of taste? Does our profession have room for taste? Maybe I'm asking the wrong questions altogether. Help me out here. Bonus Round If there is such a thing as elegance in code, and that concept is useful, do you think that justifies classifying the field of programming as an "Art" capital A, or merely a "craft". Or is it just an engineering field populated by a bunch of wishful thinking humans? Consider this question in the light of your thoughts about the elegance question. Please note that there is a distinction between code which is considered "art" in itself, and code that was written merely in the service of creating an artful program. When I ask this question, I ask if the code itself justifies calling programming an art. Bounty Note I liked the answers to this question so much, I think I'd like to make a photographic essay book from it. Released as a free PDF, and published on some kind of on demand printing service of course, such as "zazz" or "tiggle" or "printley" or something . I'd like some more answers, please!

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  • Derivative of a Higher-Order Function

    - by Claudiu
    This is in the context of Automatic Differentiation - what would such a system do with a function like map, or filter - or even one of the SKI Combinators? Example: I have the following function: def func(x): return sum(map(lambda a: a**x, range(20))) What would its derivative be? What will an AD system yield as a result? (This function is well-defined on real-number inputs).

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  • Code Golf: Banknote calculator

    - by paxdiablo
    This question was posted by a C beginner and it was an exercise to calculate, given a dollar value input by the user, the minimum number of bills (or banknotes, depending on your locale) needed to reach that dollar value. So, if the user entered 93, the output would be: $20 bills = 4 $10 bills = 1 $5 bills = 0 $1 bills = 3 Finally succumbing to the phenomenon (it's a slow day here), I thought this would be ripe for a game of Code Golf. For fairness, the input prompt needs to be (note the "_" at the end is a space): Enter a dollar amount:_ I think I've covered all the bases: no identical question, community wiki. I won't be offended if it gets shut down though - of course, I'll never be able to complain about these types of questions again, for fear of being labelled a hypocrite :-) Okay, let's see what you can come up with. Here's a sample run: Enter a dollar amount: 127 $20 bills = 6 $10 bills = 0 $5 bills = 1 $1 bills = 2

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  • What is the worst programming mistake you have made?

    - by George Edison
    Most of us are not perfect. (Well, except Jon Skeet) Have you made a terrible mistake that you would like to share? The idea is that we could all learn from our mistakes and by collecting them together here, we can avoid some common ones and discover some no-so-common ones we may have overlooked. Oh, and this question is CW, of course. Edit: This question is different than http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1928002/what-is-the-worst-programming-mistake-you-have-ever-seen because we are sharing our own mistakes. Edit again: And this one http://stackoverflow.com/questions/130965/what-is-the-worst-code-youve-ever-written is different too - it asks for code. My question does not have that restriction!

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  • Defend zero-based arrays

    - by DrJokepu
    A question asked here recently reminded me of a debate I had not long ago with a fellow programmer. Basically he argued that zero-based arrays should be replaced by one-based arrays since arrays being zero based is an implementation detail that originates from the way arrays and pointers and computer hardware work, but these sort of stuff should not be reflected in higher level languages. Now I am not really good at debating so I couldn't really offer any good reasons to stick with zero-based arrays other than they sort of feel like more appropriate. I am really interested in the opinions of other developers, so I sort of challenge you to come up with reasons to stick with zero-based arrays!

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  • Reading Source Code Aloud

    - by Jon Purdy
    After seeing this question, I got to thinking about the various challenges that blind programmers face, and how some of them are applicable even to sighted programmers. Particularly, the problem of reading source code aloud gives me pause. I have been programming for most of my life, and I frequently tutor fellow students in programming, most often in C++ or Java. It is uniquely aggravating to try to verbally convey the essential syntax of a C++ expression. The speaker must give either an idiomatic translation into English, or a full specification of the code in verbal longhand, using explicit yet slow terms such as "opening parenthesis", "bitwise and", et cetera. Neither of these solutions is optimal. On the one hand, an idiomatic translation is only useful to a programmer who can de-translate back into the relevant programming code—which is not usually the case when tutoring a student. In turn, education (or simply getting someone up to speed on a project) is the most common situation in which source is read aloud, and there is a very small margin for error. On the other hand, a literal specification is aggravatingly slow. It takes far far longer to say "pound, include, left angle bracket, iostream, right angle bracket, newline" than it does to simply type #include <iostream>. Indeed, most experienced C++ programmers would read this merely as "include iostream", but again, inexperienced programmers abound and literal specifications are sometimes necessary. So I've had an idea for a potential solution to this problem. In C++, there is a finite set of keywords—63—and operators—54, discounting named operators and treating compound assignment operators and prefix versus postfix auto-increment and decrement as distinct. There are just a few types of literal, a similar number of grouping symbols, and the semicolon. Unless I'm utterly mistaken, that's about it. So would it not then be feasible to simply ascribe a concise, unique pronunciation to each of these distinct concepts (including one for whitespace, where it is required) and go from there? Programming languages are far more regular than natural languages, so the pronunciation could be standardised. Speakers of any language would be able to verbally convey C++ code, and due to the regularity and fixity of the language, speech-to-text software could be optimised to accept C++ speech with a high degree of accuracy. So my question is twofold: first, is my solution feasible; and second, does anyone else have other potential solutions? I intend to take suggestions from here and use them to produce a formal paper with an example implementation of my solution.

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  • How to find two most distant points?

    - by depesz
    This is a question that I was asked on a job interview some time ago. And I still can't figure out sensible answer. Question is: you are given set of points (x,y). Find 2 most distant points. Distant from each other. For example, for points: (0,0), (1,1), (-8, 5) - the most distant are: (1,1) and (-8,5) because the distance between them is larger from both (0,0)-(1,1) and (0,0)-(-8,5). The obvious approach is to calculate all distances between all points, and find maximum. The problem is that it is O(n^2), which makes it prohibitively expensive for large datasets. There is approach with first tracking points that are on the boundary, and then calculating distances for them, on the premise that there will be less points on boundary than "inside", but it's still expensive, and will fail in worst case scenario. Tried to search the web, but didn't find any sensible answer - although this might be simply my lack of search skills.

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  • Programming challenge: can you code a hello world program as a Palindrome?

    - by Assaf Lavie
    So the puzzle is to write a hello world program in your language of choice, where the program's source file as a string has to be a palindrome. To be clear, the output has to be exactly "Hello, World". Edit: Well, with comments it seems trivial (not that I thought of it myself of course [sigh].. hat tip to cobbal). So new rule: no comments. Edit: I feel kind of bad editing someone else's question to say this, but it will eliminate a lot of non-palindromes that keep popping up, and I'm tired of seeing the same simple mistake over and over. The following is NOT a palindrome: ()() The following IS a palindrome: ())( Brackets, parenthesis, and anything else that must match are a major barrier to palindrome-ing, yes, but that doesn't mean you can ignore them and post non-palindrome answers. Languages represented thus far: C, C++, Bash, elisp, C#, Perl, sh, Windows shell, Java, Common Lisp, Awk, Ruby, Brainfuck, Funge, Python, Machine Language, HQ9+, Assembly, TCL, J, php, Haskell, io, TeX, APL, Javascript, mIRC Script, Basic, Orc, Fortran, Unlambda, Pseudo-code, Befunge, CFML, Lua, INTERCAL, VBScript, HTML, sed, PostScript, GolfScript, REBOL, SQL

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  • What was "The Next Big Thing" when you were just starting out in programming?

    - by Andrew
    I'm at the beginning of my career and there are lots of things which are being touted as "The Next Big Thing". For example: Dependency Injection (Spring, etc) MVC (Struts, ASP.NET MVC) ORMs (Linq To SQL, Hibernate) Agile Software Development These things have probably been around for some time, but I've only just started out. And don't get me wrong, I think these things are great! So, what was "The Next Big Thing" when you were starting out? When was it? Were people sceptical of it at first? Why? Did you think it would catch on? Did it pan out and become widely accepted/used? If not, why not? EDIT It's been nearly a week since I first posted this question and I can safely say that I did not expect such explosive interest. I asked the question so that I could gain a perspective of what kinds of innovations in programming people thought were most important when they were starting out. At the time of writing this I have read ~95% of all answers. To answer a few questions, the "Next Big Things" I listed are ones that I am currently really excited about and that I had not really been exposed to until I started working. I'm hoping to implement some or all of these in the near future at my current workplace. To many people they are probably old news. In regards to the "is this a real question" debate, I can see that obviously hasn't been settled yet. I feel bad whenever I read a comment saying that these kinds of questions take away from the real meaning of SO. I'm not wholly convinced that it doesn't. On the other hand, I have seen a lot of comments saying what a great question it is. Anyway, I have chosen "The Internet!" as my answer to this question. I don't think (in my very humble opinion, and, it seems many SOers opinions) that many things related to programming can compare. Nowadays every business and their dog has a website which can do anything from simply supplying information to purchasing goods halfway around the world to updating your blog. And of course, all these businesses need people like us. Thanks to everyone for all the great answers!

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  • Generate colors between red and green for a power meter?

    - by Simucal
    I'm writing a java game and I want to implement a power meter for how hard you are going to shoot something. I need to write a function that takes a int between 0 - 100, and based on how high that number is, it will return a color between Green (0 on the power scale) and Red (100 on the power scale). Similar to how volume controls work: What operation do I need to do on the Red, Green, and Blue components of a color to generate the colors between Green and Red? So, I could run say, getColor(80) and it will return an orangish color (its values in R, G, B) or getColor(10) which will return a more Green/Yellow rgb value. I know I need to increase components of the R, G, B values for a new color, but I don't know specifically what goes up or down as the colors shift from Green-Red. Progress: I ended up using HSV/HSB color space because I liked the gradiant better (no dark browns in the middle). The function I used was (in java): public Color getColor(double power) { double H = power * 0.4; // Hue (note 0.4 = Green, see huge chart below) double S = 0.9; // Saturation double B = 0.9; // Brightness return Color.getHSBColor((float)H, (float)S, (float)B); } Where "power" is a number between 0.0 and 1.0. 0.0 will return a bright red, 1.0 will return a bright green. Java Hue Chart: Thanks everyone for helping me with this!

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  • Generating video or images of geometrical objects from data

    - by Jonathan Barbero
    Hello, I'm working in a course's project to predict the velocity and position of the solar system planets (and other objects). It will be really cool if I can visualize the predicted objects data, if it's possible generating 3D images, if in video that's amazing. Do you know any library that lets me to use this data to generate an image or video? (I don't care in which language) Data: - simulation step (time line step for a video) - positions of the objects - radius and/or colours of the objects Thanks in advance, any suggestion is welcome.

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  • Is it immoral to write crappy code even if readability and correctness is not a requirement?

    - by mafutrct
    There are cases when crappy (i.e. unreadable and buggy) code is not much of a problem. For instance, imagine you need to generate a big text file that mostly follows a simple pattern with a few very complex exceptions. What do you do? You quickly write a simple algorithm and insert the exceptional bits in the output manually to save 4 hours. The code is unreadable, and the output is flawed, but it's still the correct way since it is way faster. But let's get this straight: I hate bad code. I've had to read and work with code that caused my stomach to hurt. I care a lot about good code. And actually, I caught myself thinking that it is immoral to write bad code even though the dirty approach is sometimes superior. I was surprised by myself and found my idea to be very irrational. Did you ever experience this? Should I just get rid of this stupid idea and use the most efficient approach to coding?

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  • Business Objects - Containers or functional?

    - by Walter
    Where I work, we've gone back and forth on this subject a number of times and are looking for a sanity check. Here's the question: Should Business Objects be data containers (more like DTOs) or should they also contain logic that can perform some functionality on that object. Example - Take a customer object, it probably contains some common properties (Name, Id, etc), should that customer object also include functions (Save, Calc, etc.)? One line of reasoning says separate the object from the functionality (single responsibility principal) and put the functionality in a Business Logic layer or object. The other line of reasoning says, no, if I have a customer object I just want to call Customer.Save and be done with it. Why do I need to know about how to save a customer if I'm consuming the object? Our last two projects have had the objects separated from the functionality, but the debate has been raised again on a new project. Which makes more sense? EDIT These results are very similar to our debates. One vote to one side or another completely changes the direction. Does anyone else want to add their 2 cents? EDIT Eventhough the answer sampling is small, it appears that the majority believe that functionality in a business object is acceptable as long as it is simple but persistence is best placed in a separate class/layer. We'll give this a try. Thanks for everyone's input...

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  • Am I immoral for using a variable name that differs from its type only by case?

    - by Jason Baker
    For instance, take this piece of code: var person = new Person(); or for you Pythonistas: person = Person() I'm told constantly how bad this is, but have yet to see an example of the immorality of these two lines of code. To me, person is a Person and trying to give it another name is a waste of time. I suppose in the days before syntax highlighting, this would have been a big deal. But these days, it's pretty easy to tell a type name apart from a variable name. Heck, it's even easy to see the difference here on SO. Or is there something I'm missing? If so, it would be helpful if you could provide an example of code that causes problems.

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  • Creating an Improved Digital Zoom

    - by Kazar
    Hey, Ok, so I have a given video source (for the sake of the example, it is a camera). It does not have optical zoom, but we supply digital zoom instead. Now this digital zoom is pretty simple, simply cropping the image to a specified portion, and filling the screen with that portion. The problem is that the zoomed video can have pretty rubbish quality when the digital zoom is enabled. I am wondering if anyone knows of an approach by which a higher quality of digital zoom can be achieved in real-time. The software is on Windows, and the video is rendered using DirectShow, but it isn't a platform solution I'm necessarily after, more just a better approach to the problem. Cheers

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