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• General questions regarding open-source licensing

  - by ndg

  I'm looking to release an open-source iOS software project but I'm very new to the licensing side of the things. While I'm aware that the majority of answers here will not lawyers, I'd appreciate it if anyone could steer me in the right direction. With the exception of the following requirements I'm happy for developers to largely do whatever they want with the projects source code. I'm not interested in any copyleft licensing schemes, and while I'd like to encourage attribution in derivative works it is not required. As such, my requirements are as follows: Original source can be distributed and re-distributed (verbatim) both commercially and non-commercially as long as the original copyright information, website link and license is maintained. I wish to retain rights to any of the multi-media distributed as part of the project (sound effects, graphics, logo marks, etc). Such assets will be included to allow other developers to easily execute the project, but cannot be re-distributed in any manner. I wish to retain rights to the applications name and branding. Futher to selecting an applicable license, I have the following questions: The project makes use of a number of third-party libraries (all licensed under variants of the MIT license). I've included individual licenses within the source (and application) and believe I've met all requirements expressed in these licenses, but is there anything else that needs to be done before distributing them as part of my open-source project? Also included in my project is a single proprietary, close-sourced library that's used to power a small part of the application. I'm obviously unable to include this in the source release, but what's the best way of handling this? Should I simply weak-link the project and exclude it entirely from the Git project?

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• What's the relationship between meta-circular interpreters, virtual machines and increased performance?

  - by Gomi

  I've read about meta-circular interpreters on the web (including SICP) and I've looked into the code of some implementations (such as PyPy and Narcissus). I've read quite a bit about two languages which made great use of metacircular evaluation, Lisp and Smalltalk. As far as I understood Lisp was the first self-hosting compiler and Smalltalk had the first "true" JIT implementation. One thing I've not fully understood is how can those interpreters/compilers achieve so good performance or, in other words, why is PyPy faster than CPython? Is it because of reflection? And also, my Smalltalk research led me to believe that there's a relationship between JIT, virtual machines and reflection. Virtual Machines such as the JVM and CLR allow a great deal of type introspection and I believe they make great use it in Just-in-Time (and AOT, I suppose?) compilation. But as far as I know, Virtual Machines are kind of like CPUs, in that they have a basic instruction set. Are Virtual Machines efficient because they include type and reference information, which would allow language-agnostic reflection? I ask this because many both interpreted and compiled languages are now using bytecode as a target (LLVM, Parrot, YARV, CPython) and traditional VMs like JVM and CLR have gained incredible boosts in performance. I've been told that it's about JIT, but as far as I know JIT is nothing new since Smalltalk and Sun's own Self have been doing it before Java. I don't remember VMs performing particularly well in the past, there weren't many non-academic ones outside of JVM and .NET and their performance was definitely not as good as it is now (I wish I could source this claim but I speak from personal experience). Then all of a sudden, in the late 2000s something changed and a lot of VMs started to pop up even for established languages, and with very good performance. Was something discovered about the JIT implementation that allowed pretty much every modern VM to skyrocket in performance? A paper or a book maybe?

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• Should Professional Development occur on company time?

  - by jshu

  As a first-time part-time software developer at a small consulting company, I'm struggling to organise time to further my own software development knowledge - whether that's reading a book, keeping up with the popular questions on StackOverflow, researching a technology we're using in-depth, or following the front page of Hacker News. I can see results borne from my self-allocated study time, but listing and demonstrating the skills and knowledge gained through Professional Development is difficult. The company does not have any defined PD policy, and there's a lot of pressure to get something deliverable done now! when working for consultants. I've checked what my coworkers do, and they don't appear to allocate any time to self-improvement; they just work at the problems they're given, looking up specific MSDN references, code samples, and the like as they need them. I realise that PD policy is going to vary across companies of different size and culture, and a company like my own is probably a bit of an edge case. I'd love to hear views and experiences from more seasoned developers; especially those who have to make the PD policy choices in their team or company. I'd also like to learn about the more radical approaches to PD, even if they're completely out there; it's always interesting to see what other people are trying. Not quite a summary, but what I'm trying to ask: Is it common or recommended for companies to allocate PD time? Whose responsibility is it to ensure a developer's knowledge and skills are up to date? Should a part-time work schedule inspire a lower ratio of PD time : work? How can a developer show non-developer coworkers that reading blogs and books is net productive? Is reading blogs and books actually net productive? (references welcomed) Is writing blogs effective as a way of PD? (a recent theme on Hacker News) This is sort of a broad question because I don't know exactly which questions I need to ask here, so any thoughts on relevant issues I haven't addressed are very welcome.

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• C# vector class - Interpolation design decision

  - by Benjamin

  Currently I'm working on a vector class in C# and now I'm coming to the point, where I've to figure out, how i want to implement the functions for interpolation between two vectors. At first I came up with implementing the functions directly into the vector class... public class Vector3D { public static Vector3D LinearInterpolate(Vector3D vector1, Vector3D vector2, double factor) { ... } public Vector3D LinearInterpolate(Vector3D other, double factor { ... } } (I always offer both: a static method with two vectors as parameters and one non-static, with only one vector as parameter) ...but then I got the idea to use extension methods (defined in a seperate class called "Interpolation" for example), since interpolation isn't really a thing only available for vectors. So this could be another solution: public class Vector3D { ... } public static class Interpolation { public static Vector3D LinearInterpolate(this Vector3D vector, Vector3D other, double factor) { ... } } So here an example how you'd use the different possibilities: { var vec1 = new Vector3D(5, 3, 1); var vec2 = new Vector3D(4, 2, 0); Vector3D vec3; vec3 = vec1.LinearInterpolate(vec2, 0.5); //1 vec3 = Vector3D.LinearInterpolate(vec1, vec2, 0.5); //2 //or with extension-methods vec3 = vec1.LinearInterpolate(vec2, 0.5); //3 (same as 1) vec3 = Interpolation.LinearInterpolation(vec1, vec2, 0.5); //4 } So I really don't know which design is better. Also I don't know if there's an ultimate rule for things like this or if it's just about what someone personally prefers. But I really would like to hear your opinions, what's better (and if possible why ).

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• How to explain a layperson why a developer should not be interrupted while neck-deep in coding?

  - by András Szepesházi

  If you just consider the second part of my question, "Why a developer should not be interrupted while neck-deep in coding", that has been discussed a number of times by smart people. Heck, even the co-founder of SO, Joel Spolsky, wrote a blog post about "getting in the zone" and "being knocked out of the zone" and why it takes an average of 15 minutes to achieve productivity when participating in complex, software development related tasks. So I think the why has been established. What I'm interested in is how to explain all that to somebody who doesn't know beans about Beans (khmm I mean software development). How to tell the wife, or the funny guy from accounting at the workplace, or the long time friend who pings you on Skype every 30 minutes with a "Wazzzzzzup?!", that all the interruptions have a much deeper impact on your work than the obvious 30 seconds they took from your time. Obviously you can't explain it by sentences like "I have to juggle a lot of variable names in my short term memory" unless you want to be the target of blank stares or friendly abuse. I'd like to be able to explain all that to non-developers in a way that will make them clearly understand - without being offensive, elitist or too technical.

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• Which web framework or technologies would suit me?

  - by Suraj Chandran

  Hi, I had been working on desktop apps and server side(non web) for some time and now I am diving in to web first time. I plan to write a scalable enterprise level app. I have worked with Java, Javascript, Jquery etc. but I absolutely hate jsp. So is there any framework that focuses on developing enterprise level web apps without jsp. I liked Wicket's approach, but I think there is a little lack of support of dynamic html in it and jquery(yes i looked at wiquery). Also I feel making wicket apps scalable would take some sweat. Can Spring MVC, Struts2 etc. help me make with this with just using say Java, JavaScript, and JQuery. Or are there any other options for me like Wicket. Please do forgive if anything above looks insane, I am still working on my understanding with enterprise web apps. NOTE: If you think that I should take a different direction or approach, please do suggest!

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• Is 'Protection' an acceptable Java class name

  - by jonny

  This comes from a closed thread at stack overflow, where there are already some useful answers, though a commenter suggested I post here. I hope this is ok! I'm trying my best to write good readable, code, but often have doubts in my work! I'm creating some code to check the status of some protected software, and have created a class which has methods to check whether the software in use is licensed (there is a separate Licensing class). I've named the class 'Protection', which is currently accessed, via the creation of an appProtect object. The methods in the class allow to check a number of things about the application, in order to confirm that it is in fact licensed for use. Is 'Protection' an acceptable name for such a class? I read somewhere that if you have to think to long in names of methods, classes, objects etc, then perhaps you may not be coding in an Object Oriented way. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this before making this post, which has lead me to doubt the suitability of the name! In creating (and proof reading) this post, I'm starting to seriously doubt my work so far. I'm also thinking I should probably rename the object to applicationProtection rather than appProtect (though am open to any comments on this too?). I'm posting non the less, in the hope that I'll learn something from others views/opinions, even if they're simply confirming I've "done it wrong"!

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• Example of persisting an inheritance relationship using ORM

  - by Schemer

  I have some experience with OOP and RDBs, but very little exposure to web programming. I am trying to understand what non-trivial types of problems are solved by ORM. Of course, I am familiar with the need for data persistence, but I have never encountered a need for persisting relationships between objects, a situation which is indicated in many online articles about ORM. I am not asking about the process of persisting a POJO to a database and restoring it later. Nor am I asking about why ORM frameworks are useful -- or a pain in the butt -- for doing so. I am particularly interested in how the need arises to persist and restore relationships between objects. In various documentation, I have seen many examples of persisting POJOs to a database, but the examples have all been for only very simple objects that are essentially nothing more than records anyway: a constructor, some private fields, and getter/setter methods. The motivation for persisting such an "object-record" seems obvious and trivial. This example: Hibernate ORM Tutorial offers such an example, but goes on to discuss mismatch issues of granularity, inheritance, identity, associations, and navigation that are not motivated by the example. If someone could offer a toy example of an instance where, say, the need arises to persist an inheritance relationship, I would be grateful. This might be blindingly obvious for anyone who has already encountered this situation but I have not and a great deal of searching and reading have not turned up any examples.

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• still about perl vs python but (to me) slightly different from what has been asked [closed]

  - by B Chen

  Being a newbie to coding, I read from this site that Perl is still as viable as it has been, while Python, quoted from someone else's post, is good but just "snake oil" (not sure what this refers to exactly though). So from the responses in that post, I got the gist that Perl is good and worthy to learn. My question is - pardon me for phrasing it in this "non-programmer's" way - Which one should I learn FIRST? (I am actually currently learning R) Here below is the background info - (a) I will be using it mostly for data mining and statistics analysis (b) Will there be this "first" and "later" issue with learning either Perl or Python? That is, after I become competent with one language, would there be a need to learn the second one (for a similar task??) (c) If there should be circumstances where I must learn the second one, would learning Perl FIRST be better than learning Python? I hope to learn as much from exchanging info here, so please help provide with more than just "it depends" type of info. Great many thanks to all who choose to respond to my query.

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• Does a mature agile team requires any management?

  - by ashy_32bit

  After a recent heated debate over Scrum, I realized my problem is that I think of management as a quite unnecessary and redundant activity in a fully agile team. I believe a mature Agile team does not require management or any non-technical decision making process whatsoever. To my (apparently erring) eyes it is more than obvious that the only one suitable and capable of managing a mature development team is their coach (who is the most technically competent colleague with proper communication skills). I can't imagine how a Scrum master can contribute to such a team. I am having great difficulty realizing and understanding the value of such things in Scrum and the manager as someone who is not a veteran developer but is well skilled in planning the production cycles when a coach exists in the team. What does that even mean? How on earth can someone with no edge-skills of development manage a highly technical team? Perhaps management here means something else? I see management as a total waste of time and a by-product of immaturity. In my understanding a mature team is fully self-managing. Apparently I'm mistaken since many great people say the contrary but I can't convince myself.

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• Design pattern for an automated mechanical test bench

  - by JJS

  Background I have a test fixture with a number of communication/data acquisition devices on it that is used as an end of line test for a product. Because of all the various sensors used in the bench and the need to run the test procedure in near real-time, I'm having a hard time structuring the program to be more friendly to modify later on. For example, a National Instruments USB data acquisition device is used to control an analog output (load) and monitor an analog input (current), a digital scale with a serial data interface measures position, an air pressure gauge with a different serial data interface, and the product is interfaced through a proprietary DLL that handles its own serial communication. The hard part The "real-time" aspect of the program is my biggest tripping point. For example, I need to time how long the product needs to go from position 0 to position 10,000 to the tenth of a second. While it's traveling, I need to ramp up an output of the NI DAQ when it reaches position 6,000 and ramp it down when it reaches position 8,000. This sort of control looks easy from browsing NI's LabVIEW docs but I'm stuck with C# for now. All external communication is done by polling which makes for lots of annoying loops. I've slapped together a loose Producer Consumer model where the Producer thread loops through reading the sensors and sets the outputs. The Consumer thread executes functions containing timed loops that poll the Producer for current data and execute movement commands as required. The UI thread polls both threads for updating some gauges indicating current test progress. Unsure where to start Is there a more appropriate pattern for this type of application? Are there any good resources for writing control loops in software (non-LabVIEW) that interface with external sensors and whatnot?

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• Is what someone publishes on the Internet fair game when considering them for employment as a programmer?

  - by Jon Hopkins

  (Originally posted on Stack Overflow but closed there and more relevant for here) So we first interviewed a guy for a technical role and he was pretty good. Before the second interview we googled him and found his MySpace page which could, to put it mildly, be regarded as inappropriate. Just to be clear there was no doubt that it was his page (name, photos, matching biographical information and so on). The content was entirely personal and in no way related to his professional abilities or attitude. Is it fair to consider this when thinking about whether to offer them a job? In most situations my response would be what goes on in someone's private life is their own doing. However for anyone technical who professes (implicitly or explicitly) to understand the Internet and the possibilities it offers, is posting things in a way which can so obviously be discovered a significant error of judgement? EDIT: Clarification - essentially it was a fairly graphic commentary on porn (but of, shall we say, a non-academic nature). I'm actually more interested in the general concept than the specific incident as it's something we're likely to see more in the future as people put more and more of themselves on-line. My concerns are not primarily about him and how he feels about such things (he's white, straight, male and about the last possible victim of discrimination on the planet in that sense), more how it reflects on the company that a very simple search (basically his name) returns these things and that clients may also do it. We work in a relatively conservative industry.

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• REST Service and CQRS

  - by Paul Wade

  I am struggling with architecture on a new project. I am using the following patterns/technology. CQRS - anything going in goes through a command REST - using WebAPI MVC - asp.net mvc Angular - building a spa nhibernate I belive this provides some great separation and should help keep a very complex domain from growing into a giant set of services that mix queries with other business logic. The REST services have become non restful. They are putting methods in rest that are "SearchByDate", "SearchByItem" etc. Service Methods that execute commands are called with a "web" model class, a new command is built in the service and executed, I feel like there is a lot of extra code. I expected this to be much different but I wasn't around to keep things on track. Finally my questions are this... I would have liked to see PUT Person (CreatePersonCommand) but then I realized that isn't restful either is it? the put should be a person entity not a command. Can I make CQRS and REST service work together or am I going about this all wrong? How do I handle service methods that don't fit into a REST model. I am not performing CRUD on the object but rather executing some business logic. I.E. I don't want the UI to be responsible for how a shipment is "unshipped" I want the service layer to worry about that.

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• "Programming error" exceptions - Is my approach sound?

  - by Medo42

  I am currently trying to improve my use of exceptions, and found the important distinction between exceptions that signify programming errors (e.g. someone passed null as argument, or called a method on an object after it was disposed) and those that signify a failure in the operation that is not the caller's fault (e.g. an I/O exception). As far as I understand, it makes little sense for an immediate caller to actually handle programming error exceptions, he should instead assure that the preconditions are met. Only "outer" exception handlers at task boundaries should catch them, so they can keep the system running if a task fails. In order to ensure that client code can cleanly catch "failure" exceptions without catching error exceptions by mistake, I create my own exception classes for all failure exceptions now, and document them in the methods that throw them. I would make them checked exceptions in Java. Now I have a few questions: Before, I tried to document all exceptions that a method could throw, but that sometimes creates an unwiedly list that needs to be documented in every method up the call chain until you can show that the error won't happen. Instead, I document the preconditions in the summary / parameter descriptions and don't even mention what happens if they are not met. The idea is that people should not try to catch these exceptions explicitly anyway, so there is no need to document their types. Would you agree that this is enough? Going further, do you think all preconditions even need to be documented for every method? For example, calling methods in IDisposable objects after calling Dispose is an error, but since IDisposable is such a widely used interface, can I just assume a programmer will know this? A similar case is with reference type parameters where passing null makes no conceivable sense: Should I document "non-null" anyway? IMO, documentation should only cover things that are not obvious, but I am not sure where "obvious" ends.

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• An alternative to a video codec for storing motion changes [on hold]

  - by Andrew Simpson

  I have a 3 dimensional byte array. The 3-d array represents a jpeg image. Each channel/array represents part of the RGB spectrum. I am not interested in retaining black pixels. A black pixel is represented by this atypical arrangement: myarray[0,0,0] =0; myarray[0,0,1] =0; myarray[0,0,2] =0; So, I have flattened this 3d array out to a 1d array by doing this byte[] AFlatArray = new byte[width x height x 3] and then assigning values respective to the coordinate. But like I said I do not want black pixels. So this array has to only contain color pixels with the x,y coordinate. The result I want is to re-represent the image from the i dimension byte array that only contains non-black pixels. How do I do that? It looks like I have to store black pixels as well because of the xy coordinate system. I have tried writing to a binary file but the size of that file is greater than the jpeg file as the jpeg file is compressed. I am using c#.

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• Session serialization in JavaEE environment

  - by Ionut

  Please consider the following scenario: We are working on a JavaEE project for which the scalability starts to become an issue. Up until now, we were able to scale up but this is no longer an option. Therefore we need to consider scaling out and preparing the App for a clustered environment. Our main concern right now is serializing the user sessions. Sadly, we did not consider from the beginning the issue and we are encountering the following excetion: java.io.WriteAbortedException: writing aborted; java.io.NotSerializableException: org.apache.catalina.session.StandardSessionFacade I did some research and this exception is thrown because there are objects stored on the session which does not implement the Serializable interface. Considering that all over the app there are quite a few custom objects which are stored on the session without implementing this interface, it would require a lot of tedious work and dedication to fix all these classes declaration. We will fix all this declarations but the main concern is that, in the future, there may be a developer which will add a non Serializable object on the session and break the session serialization & replication over multiple nodes. As a quick overview of the project, we are developing using a home grown framework based on Struts 1 with the Servlet 3.0 API. This means that at this point, we are using the standard session.getAttribute() and session.setAttribute() to work with the session and the session handling is scattered all over the code base. Besides updating the classes of the objects stored on session and making sure that they implement the Serializable interface, what other measures of precaution should we take in order to ensure a reliable Session replication capability on the Application layer? I know it is a little bit late to consider this but what would be the best practice in this case? Furthermore, are there any other issues we should consider regarding this transition? Thank you in advance!

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• Securing credentials passed to web service

  - by Greg Smith

  I'm attempting to design a single sign on system for use in a distributed architecture. Specifically, I must provide a way for a client website (that is, a website on a different domain/server/network) to allow users to register accounts on my central system. So, when the user takes an action on a client website, and that action is deemed to require an account, the client will produce a page (on their site/domain) where the user can register for a new account by providing an email and password. The client must then send this information to a web service, which will register the account and return some session token type value. The client will need to hash the password before sending it across the wire, and the webservice will require https, but this doesn't feel like it's safe enough and I need some advice on how I can implement this in the most secure way possible. A few other bits of relevant information: Ideally we'd prefer not to share any code with the client We've considered just redirecting the user to a secure page on the same server as the webservice, but this is likely to be rejected for non-technical reasons. We almost certainaly need to salt the password before hashing and passing it over, but that requires the client to either a) generate the salt and communicate it to us, or b) come and ask us for the salt - both feel dirty. Any help or advice is most appreciated.

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• Modelling work-flow plus interaction with a database - quick and accessible options

  - by cjmUK

  I'm wanting to model a (proposed) manufacturing line, with specific emphasis on interaction with a traceability database. That is, various process engineers have already mapped the manufacturing process - I'm only interested in the various stations along the line that have to talk to the DB. The intended audience is a mixture of project managers, engineers and IT people - the purpose is to identify: points at which the line interacts with the DB (perhaps going so far as indicating the Store Procs called at each point, perhaps even which parameters are passed.) the communication source (PC/Handheld device/PLC) the communication medium (wireless/fibre/copper) control flow (if leak test fails, unit is diverted to repair station) Basically, the model will be used as a focus different groups on outstanding tasks; for example, I'm interested in the DB and any front-end app needed, process engineers need to be thinking about the workflow and liaising with the PLC suppliers, the other IT guys need to make sure we have the hardware and comms in place. Obviously I could just improvise in Visio, but I was wondering if there was a particular modelling technique that might particularly suit my needs or my audience. I'm thinking of a visual model with supporting documentation (as little as possible, as much as is necessary). Clearly, I don't want something that will take me ages to (effectively) learn, nor one that will alienate non-technical members of the project team. So far I've had brief looks at BPMN, EPC Diagrams, standard Flow Diagrams... and I've forgotten most of what I used to know about UML... And I'm not against picking and mixing... as long as it is quick, clear and effective. Conclusion: In the end, I opted for a quasi-workflow/dataflow diagram. I mapped out the parts of the manufacturing process that interact with the traceability DB, and indicated in a significantly-simplified form, the data flows and DB activity. Alongside which, I have a supporting document which outlines each process, the data being transacted for each process (a 'data dictionary' of sorts) and details of hardware and connectivity required. I can't decide whether is a product of genius or a crime against established software development practices, but I do think that is will hit the mark for this particular audience.

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• Questions about Code Reviews

  - by bamboocha

  My team plans to do Code Review and asked me to make a concept what and how we are going to make our Code Reviews. We are a little group of 6 team members. We use an SVN repository and write programs in different languages (mostly: VB.NET, Java, C#), but the reviews should be also possible for others, yet not defined. Basically I am asking you, how are you doing it, to be more precise I made a list of some questions I got: 1. Peer Meetings vs Ticket System? Would you tend to do meetings with all members, rather than something like a ticket system, where the developer can add a new code change and some or all need to check and approve it? 1. What tool? I made some researches on my own and it showed that Rietveld seems to be the program to use for non-git solutions. Do you agree/disagree and why? 2. A good workflow to follow? 3. Are there good ways to minimize the effort for those meetings even more? 4. What are good questions, every code reviewer should follow? I already made a list with some questions, what would you append/remove? are there any magic numbers in the code? do all variable and method names make sense and are easily understandable? are all querys using prepared statement? are all objects disposed/closed when they are not needed anymore? 5. What are your general experiences with it? What's important? Things to consider/prevent/watch out?

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• What triggered the popularity of lambda functions in modern mainstream programming languages?

  - by Giorgio

  In the last few years anonymous functions (AKA lambda functions) have become a very popular language construct and almost every major / mainstream programming language has introduced them or is planned to introduce them in an upcoming revision of the standard. Yet, anonymous functions are a very old and very well-known concept in Mathematics and Computer Science (invented by the mathematician Alonzo Church around 1936, and used by the Lisp programming language since 1958, see e.g. here). So why didn't today's mainstream programming languages (many of which originated 15 to 20 years ago) support lambda functions from the very beginning and only introduced them later? And what triggered the massive adoption of anonymous functions in the last few years? Is there some specific event, new requirement or programming technique that started this phenomenon? IMPORTANT NOTE The focus of this question is the introduction of anonymous functions in modern, main-stream (and therefore, maybe with a few exceptions, non functional) languages. Also, note that anonymous functions (blocks) are present in Smalltalk, which is not a functional language, and that normal named functions have been present even in procedural languages like C and Pascal for a long time. Please do not overgeneralize your answers by speaking about "the adoption of the functional paradigm and its benefits", because this is not the topic of the question.

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• What do you do if you reach a design dead-end in evolutionary methods like Agile or XP?

  - by Dipan Mehta

  As I was reading Martin Fowler's famous blog post Is Design Dead?, one of the striking impressions I got is that given the fact that in Agile Methodology and Extreme Programming, the design as well as programming is evolutionary, there are always points where things need to get refactored. It may be possible that when a programmer's level is good, and they understand design implications and don't make critical mistakes, the code continues to evolve. However, in a normal context, what is the ground reality in this context? In a normal day given some significant development goes into product, and when critical change occurs in requirement isn't it a constraint that how much ever we wish, fundamental design aspects cannot be modified? (without throwing away major part of the code). Is it not quite likely that one reaches dead-end on any further possible improvement on design and requirements? I am not advocating any non-Agile practice here, but I want to know from people who practice agile or iterative or evolutionary development methods, as for their real experiences. Have you ever reached such dead-ends? How have you managed to avoid it or escaped it? Or are there measures to ensure that design remains clean and flexible as it evolves?

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• Be liberal in what you accept... or not?

  - by Matthieu M.

  [Disclaimer: this question is subjective, but I would prefer getting answers backed by facts and/or reflexions] I think everyone knows about the Robustness Principle, usually summed up by Postel's Law: Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept. I would agree that for the design of a widespread communication protocol this may make sense (with the goal of allowing easy extension), however I have always thought that its application to HTML / CSS was a total failure, each browser implementing its own silent tweak detection / behavior, making it near impossible to obtain a consistent rendering across multiple browsers. I do notice though that there the RFC of the TCP protocol deems "Silent Failure" acceptable unless otherwise specified... which is an interesting behavior, to say the least. There are other examples of the application of this principle throughout the software trade that regularly pop up because they have bitten developpers, from the top off my head: Javascript semi-colon insertion C (silent) builtin conversions (which would not be so bad if it did not truncated...) and there are tools to help implement "smart" behavior: name matching phonetic algorithms (Double Metaphone) string distances algorithms (Levenshtein distance) However I find that this approach, while it may be helpful when dealing with non-technical users or to help users in the process of error recovery, has some drawbacks when applied to the design of library/classes interface: it is somewhat subjective whether the algorithm guesses "right", and thus it may go against the Principle of Least Astonishment it makes the implementation more difficult, thus more chances to introduce bugs (violation of YAGNI ?) it makes the behavior more susceptible to change, as any modification of the "guess" routine may break old programs, nearly excluding refactoring possibilities... from the start! And this is what led me to the following question: When designing an interface (library, class, message), do you lean toward the robustness principle or not ? I myself tend to be quite strict, using extensive input validation on my interfaces, and I was wondering if I was perhaps too strict.

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• Augmenting functionality of subclasses without code duplication in C++

  - by Rob W

  I have to add common functionality to some classes that share the same superclass, preferably without bloating the superclass. The simplified inheritance chain looks like this: Element -> HTMLElement -> HTMLAnchorElement Element -> SVGElement -> SVGAlement The default doSomething() method on Element is no-op by default, but there are some subclasses that need an actual implementation that requires some extra overridden methods and instance members. I cannot put a full implementation of doSomething() in Element because 1) it is only relevant for some of the subclasses, 2) its implementation has a performance impact and 3) it depends on a method that could be overridden by a class in the inheritance chain between the superclass and a subclass, e.g. SVGElement in my example. Especially because of the third point, I wanted to solve the problem using a template class, as follows (it is a kind of decorator for classes): struct Element { virtual void doSomething() {} }; // T should be an instance of Element template<class T> struct AugmentedElement : public T { // doSomething is expensive and uses T virtual void doSomething() override {} // Used by doSomething virtual bool shouldDoSomething() = 0; }; class SVGElement : public Element { /* ... */ }; class SVGAElement : public AugmentedElement<SVGElement> { // some non-trivial check bool shouldDoSomething() { /* ... */ return true; } }; // Similarly for HTMLAElement and others I looked around (in the existing (huge) codebase and on the internet), but didn't find any similar code snippets, let alone an evaluation of the effectiveness and pitfalls of this approach. Is my design the right way to go, or is there a better way to add common functionality to some subclasses of a given superclass?

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• How do you KISS?

  - by Conor

  The KISS principle is a highly quoted design mantra. The aim of this principle is to stamp out unnecessary complexity on a project. This is a good thing, saving time, energy and money. It can lead to a relatively stress free implementation and a simple, elegant, maintainable end product. A lot of discussion on KISS provides mechanisms to simplify requirements, design and implementation. Things that spring to mind include: avoid scope creep; simple obvious design and code; minimal run-time dependencies; refactoring to maintain simplicity; etc. However there are a lot of implicit things that we do to KISS. Examples: small team sizes; minimal management layers; tidy desk; mastery of a single IDE; clear concise error messages; scripts to automate/encapsulate tasks; etc Why KISS practices do you apply? How have they been of benefit? I'm especially interested in non-obvious practices.

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• Sharing business logic between server-side and client-side of web application?

  - by thoughtpunch

  Quick question concerning shared code/logic in back and front ends of a web application. I have a web application (Rails + heavy JS) that parses metadata from HTML pages fetched via a user supplied URL (think Pinterest or Instapaper). Currently this processing takes place exclusively on the client-side. The code that fetches the URL and parses the DOM is in a fairly large set of JS scripts in our Rails app. Occasionally want to do this processing on the server-side of the app. For example, what if a user supplied a URL but they have JS disabled or have a non-standard compliant browser, etc. Ideally I'd like to be able to process these URLS in Ruby on the back-end (in asynchronous background jobs perhaps) using the same logic that our JS parsers use WITHOUT porting the JS to Ruby. I've looked at systems that allow you to execute JS scripts in the backend like execjs as well as Ruby-to-Javascript compilers like OpalRB that would hopefully allow "write-once, execute many", but I'm not sure that either is the right decision. Whats the best way to avoid business logic duplication for apps that need to do both client-side and server-side processing of similar data?

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