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• Why do old programming languages continue to be revised?

  - by SunAvatar

  This question is not, "Why do people still use old programming languages?" I understand that quite well. In fact the two programming languages I know best are C and Scheme, both of which date back to the 70s. Recently I was reading about the changes in C99 and C11 versus C89 (which seems to still be the most-used version of C in practice and the version I learned from K&R). Looking around, it seems like every programming language in heavy use gets a new specification at least once per decade or so. Even Fortran is still getting new revisions, despite the fact that most people using it are still using FORTRAN 77. Contrast this with the approach of, say, the typesetting system TeX. In 1989, with the release of TeX 3.0, Donald Knuth declared that TeX was feature-complete and future releases would contain only bug fixes. Even beyond this, he has stated that upon his death, "all remaining bugs will become features" and absolutely no further updates will be made. Others are free to fork TeX and have done so, but the resulting systems are renamed to indicate that they are different from the official TeX. This is not because Knuth thinks TeX is perfect, but because he understands the value of a stable, predictable system that will do the same thing in fifty years that it does now. Why do most programming language designers not follow the same principle? Of course, when a language is relatively new, it makes sense that it will go through a period of rapid change before settling down. And no one can really object to minor changes that don't do much more than codify existing pseudo-standards or correct unintended readings. But when a language still seems to need improvement after ten or twenty years, why not just fork it or start over, rather than try to change what is already in use? If some people really want to do object-oriented programming in Fortran, why not create "Objective Fortran" for that purpose, and leave Fortran itself alone? I suppose one could say that, regardless of future revisions, C89 is already a standard and nothing stops people from continuing to use it. This is sort of true, but connotations do have consequences. GCC will, in pedantic mode, warn about syntax that is either deprecated or has a subtly different meaning in C99, which means C89 programmers can't just totally ignore the new standard. So there must be some benefit in C99 that is sufficient to impose this overhead on everyone who uses the language. This is a real question, not an invitation to argue. Obviously I do have an opinion on this, but at the moment I'm just trying to understand why this isn't just how things are done already. I suppose the question is: What are the (real or perceived) advantages of updating a language standard, as opposed to creating a new language based on the old?

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• Layout Columns - Equal Height

  - by Kyle

  I remember first starting out using tables for layouts and learned that I should not be doing that. I am working on a new site and can not seem to do equal height columns without using tables. Here is an example of the attempt with div tags. <div class="row"> <div class="column">column1</div> <div class="column">column2</div> <div class="column">column3</div> <div style="clear:both"></div> </div> Now what I tried with that was doing making columns float left and setting their widths to 33% which works fine, I use the clear:both div so that the row would be the size of the biggest column, but the columns will be different sizes based on how much content they have. I have found many fixes which mostly involve css hacks and just making it look like its right but that's not what I want. I thought of just doing it in javascript but then it would look different for those who choose to disable their javascript. The only true way of doing it that I can think of is using tables since the cells all have equal heights in the same row. But I know its bad to use tables. After searching forever I than came across this: http://intangiblestyle.com/lab/equal-height-columns-with-css/ What it seems to do is exactly the same as tables since its just setting its display exactly like tables. Would using that be just as bad as using tables? I honestly can't find anything else that I could do. edit @Su' I have looked into "faux columns" and do not think that is what I want. I think I would be able to implement better designs for my site using the display:table method. I posted this question because I just wasn't sure if I should since I have always heard its bad using tables in website layouts.

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• How to name setter that does data conversion?

  - by IAdapter

  I'm struggling with how to name this method, I don't like the "set" prefix, because I feel it should be reserved for normal "dumb" setters and some tools might not like it (i did not check it in checkstyle, pmd, etc., but I got a feeling they won't like it.) for example (in java, but I feel its language agnostic) public void setActionListenerClicked(boolean actionListenerClicked) { this.actionListenerClicked = actionListenerClicked ? "1" : "0"; } The only purpose of this method is ONLY to set, this method is needed and cannot be joined with any other (because of framework used). P.S. I DO know that question is similar to How to name multi-setter?, but I feel its not the same question.

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• How to have operations with character/items on binary with concrete operations on C++?

  - by Piperoman

  I have the next problem. A item can have a lot of states: NORMAL = 0000000 DRY = 0000001 HOT = 0000010 BURNING = 0000100 WET = 0001000 COLD = 0010000 FROZEN = 0100000 POISONED= 1000000 A item can have some states at same time but not all of them Is impossible to be dry and wet at same time. If you COLD a WET item, it turns into FROZEN. If you HOT a WET item, it turns into NORMAL A item can be BURNING and POISON Etc. I have tried to set binary flags to states, and use AND to combine different states, checking before if it is possible or not to do it, or change to another status. Does there exist a concrete approach to solve this problem efficiently without having an interminable switch that checks every state with every new state? It is relatively easy to check 2 different states, but if there exists a third state it is not trivial to do.

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• Breaking up classes and methods into smaller units

  - by micahhoover

  During code reviews a couple devs have recommended I break up my methods into smaller methods. Their justification was (1) increased readability and (2) the back trace that comes back from production showing the method name is more specific to the line of code that failed. There may have also been some colorful words about functional programming. Additionally I think I may have failed an interview a while back because I didn't give an acceptable answer about when to break things up. My inclination is that when I see a bunch of methods in a class or across a bunch of files, it isn't clear to me how they flow together, and how many times each one gets called. I don't really have a good feel for the linearity of it as quickly just by eye-balling it. The other thing is a lot of people seem to place a premium of organization over content (e.g. 'Look at how organized my sock drawer is!' Me: 'Overall, I think I can get to my socks faster if you count the time it took to organize them'). Our business requirements are not very stable. I'm afraid that if the classes/methods are very granular it will take longer to refactor to requirement changes. I'm not sure how much of a factor this should be. Anyway, computer science is part art / part science, but I'm not sure how much this applies to this issue.

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• How to Structure a Trinary state in DB and Application

  - by ABMagil

  How should I structure, in the DB especially, but also in the application, a trinary state? For instance, I have user feedback records which need to be reviewed before they are presented to the general public. This means a feedback reviewer must see the unreviewed feedback, then approve or reject them. I can think of a couple ways to represent this: Two boolean flags: Seen/Unseen and Approved/Rejected. This is the simplest and probably the smallest database solution (presumably boolean fields are simple bits). The downside is that there are really only three states I care about (unseen/approved/rejected) and this creates four states, including one I don't care about (a record which is seen but not approved or rejected is essentially unseen). String column in the DB with constants/enum in application. Using Rating::APPROVED_STATE within the application and letting it equal whatever it wants in the DB. This is a larger column in the db and I'm concerned about doing string comparisons whenever I need these records. Perhaps mitigatable with an index? Single boolean column, but allow nulls. A true is approved, a false is rejected. A null is unseen. Not sure the pros/cons of this solution. What are the rules I should use to guide my choice? I'm already thinking in terms of DB size and the cost of finding records based on state, as well as the readability of code the ends up using this structure.

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• Is having 'Util' classes a cause for concern? [closed]

  - by Matt Fenwick

  I sometimes create 'Util' classes which primarily serve to hold methods and values that don't really seem to belong elsewhere. But every time I create one of these classes, I think "uh-oh, I'm gonna regret this later ...", because I read somewhere that it's bad. But on the other hand, there seem to be two compelling (at least for me) cases for them: implementation secrets that are used in multiple classes within a package providing useful functionality to augment a class, without cluttering its interface Am I on the way to destruction? What you say !! Should I refactor?

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• How to handle status columns in designing tables

  - by altsyset

  How to handle multiple statuses for a table entry, for example an item table may have an active, inactive, fast moving, and/or batch statuses. And I wanted to handle them in single column with VARCHAR type. Also I might set each of those attributes as a boolean with different columns. But I am not sure what consequences this might lead to. So if you have experienced such situations which one would be the best way to handle it?

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• How to handle monetary values in PHP and MySql?

  - by Songo

  I've inherited a huge pile of legacy code written in PHP on top of a MySQL database. The thing I noticed is that the application uses doubles for storage and manipulation of data. Now I came across of numerous posts mentioning how double are not suited for monetary operations because of the rounding errors. However, I have yet to come across a complete solution to how monetary values should be handled in PHP code and stored in a MySQL database. Is there a best practice when it comes to handling money specifically in PHP? Things I'm looking for are: How should the data be stored in the database? column type? size? How should the data be handling in normal addition, subtraction. multiplication or division? When should I round the values? How much rounding is acceptable if any? Is there a difference between handling large monetary values and low ones? Note: A VERY simplified sample code of how I might encounter money values in everyday life: $a= $_POST['price_in_dollars']; //-->(ex: 25.06) will be read as a string should it be cast to double? $b= $_POST['discount_rate'];//-->(ex: 0.35) value will always be less than 1 $valueToBeStored= $a * $b; //--> any hint here is welcomed $valueFromDatabase= $row['price']; //--> price column in database could be double, decimal,...etc. $priceToPrint=$valueFromDatabase * 0.25; //again cast needed or not? I hope you use this sample code as a means to bring out more use cases and not to take it literally of course. Bonus Question If I'm to use an ORM such as Doctrine or PROPEL, how different will it be to use money in my code.

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• How should I write new code when the old codebase and the environment uses lots of globals in PHP

  - by Nicola Peluchetti

  I'm working in the Wordpress environment which itself heavily relies on globals and the codebase I'm maintaining introduces some more. I want this to change and so I'm trying to think how should I handle this. For the globals our code has introduced I think I will set them as dependencies in the constructor or in getter / setter so that I don't rely on them being globals and then refactor the old codebase little by little so that we have no globals. With Wordpress globals I was thinking to wrap all WP globals inside a Wrapper class and hide them in there. Like this class WpGlobals { public static function getDb() { global $wpdb; return $wpdb; } } Would this be of any help? The idea is that I centralize all globals in one class and do not scatter them through the code, so that if Wordpress kills one of them I need to modify code only in one place. What would you do?

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• Questioning one of the arguments for dependency injection: Why is creating an object graph hard?

  - by oberlies

  Dependency injection frameworks like Google Guice give the following motivation for their usage (source): To construct an object, you first build its dependencies. But to build each dependency, you need its dependencies, and so on. So when you build an object, you really need to build an object graph. Building object graphs by hand is labour intensive (...) and makes testing difficult. But I don't buy this argument: Even without dependency injection, I can write classes which are both easy to instantiate and convenient to test. E.g. the example from the Guice motivation page could be rewritten in the following way: class BillingService { private final CreditCardProcessor processor; private final TransactionLog transactionLog; // constructor for tests, taking all collaborators as parameters BillingService(CreditCardProcessor processor, TransactionLog transactionLog) { this.processor = processor; this.transactionLog = transactionLog; } // constructor for production, calling the (productive) constructors of the collaborators public BillingService() { this(new PaypalCreditCardProcessor(), new DatabaseTransactionLog()); } public Receipt chargeOrder(PizzaOrder order, CreditCard creditCard) { ... } } So there may be other arguments for dependency injection (which are out of scope for this question!), but easy creation of testable object graphs is not one of them, is it?

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• Trying to Integrate Five9 and Apptivio [on hold]

  - by David Mitchell

  Five9 is a calling system application and Apptivio will be used to store client information for purchased products. Specifically what I need is an example code that will allow me to access Five9's CRM system using the access key and transfer a persons first and last name, for example, to Apptivio. The issue is I have never dealt with this type of system and I cannot find any information for it other than the Web2Campaign that was sent to me by Five9. Lets say this is the code from Five9 F9key=first_name&F9key=last_name&first_name=jon&last_name=smith Once this information is placed into Five9 I must update Apptivio with this information. I am lost as to how to send this information to Apptivio.

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• Using "prevent execution of method" flags

  - by tpaksu

  First of all I want to point out my concern with some pseudocode (I think you'll understand better) Assume you have a global debug flag, or class variable named "debug", class a : var debug = FALSE and you use it to enable debug methods. There are two types of usage it as I know: first in a method : method a : if debug then call method b; method b : second in the method itself: method a : call method b; method b : if not debug exit And I want to know, is there any File IO or stack pointer wise difference between these two approaches. Which usage is better, safer and why?

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• Have you worked with a well designed application?

  - by Vilx-

  Inspired by this question, I started wondering - is there or has there ever been such a thing as a "well designed application"? One where the architecture would be perfect and no refactoring would ever be needed; code would be easy to read and understand even for someone new to the project; changes could be done with a 100% certainty that they won't break anything; etc? I must admit that whatever codebases I've worked with, they've all been more or less a mess. Even code that I start myself only stays organized at the start, and then slowly deteriorates as the time passes. I'm even starting to accept this as part of life and can't figure out whether I should be worried about that or not. So... is there such a thing as a "well designed application"? Or is all our code so shitty that there isn't even a point in trying to make it better, because it will never be good anyway?

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• How to implement "bullet time" in a multiplayer game?

  - by Tom

  I have never seen such a feature before, but it should provide an interesting gameplay opportunity. So yes, in a multiplayer/real-time environment (imagine FPS), how could I implement a slow motion/bullet time effect? Something like an illusion for the player that's currently slo-mo'ed. So everybody sees him "real-time", but he sees everything slowed down. Update A sidenote: keep in mind that a FPS game has to be balanced in order for it to be fun. So yes, this bullet time feature has to be solid, giving a small advantage to the "player", while not taking away from other players. Plus, there is a possibility that two players could activate their bullet time at the same time. Furthermore: I'm going to implement this in the future no matter what it takes. And, the idea is to build a whole new game engine for all this. If that gives new options, I'm more then interested in hearing the ideas. Meanwhile, here with my team we're thinking about this too, when our theory will be crafted, I'm going to share it here. Is this even possible? So, the question on "is this even possible" has been answered, now it's time to find the best solution. I'm keeping the "answer" until something exceptionally good comes up, like a prototype theory with something close to working pseudo code.

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• what knowledge would I need to make a good simulation games

  - by Skeith

  I have an idea for a game like theme park but don't know how simulation games are made. I am not some noob on his first game so I appreciated constructive answers instead of "its hard, don't do it". What I want is to know how simulation game mechanics are put together. I figure it would be heaver on the AI than normal games and not knowing much about AI would like to know some programming techniques I should look into for this style game. specific techniques please not just a book on ai. what sort of architecture would be used? I guess it would have some sort of probability engine with pre designed events that are triggered based on the AI state. Would it use a FSM or be purely event driven ? Any information on how a sims game functions would be cool.

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• How should I architect a personal schedule manager that runs 24/7?

  - by Crawford Comeaux

  I've developed an ADHD management system for myself that's attempting to change multiple habits at once. I know this is counter to conventional wisdom, but I've tried the conventional for years & am now trying it my way. (just wanted to say that to try and prevent it from distracting people from the actual question) Anyway, I'd like to write something to run on a remote server that monitors me, helps me build/avoid certain habits, etc. What this amounts to is a system that: runs 24/7 may have multiple independent tasks to run at once may have tasks that require other tasks to run first lets tasks be scheduled by specific time, recurrence (ie. "run every 5 mins"), or interval (ie. "run from 2pm to 3pm") My first naive attempt at this was just a single PHP script scheduled to run every minute by cron (language was chosen in order to use a certain library, but no longer necessary). The logic behind when to run this or that portion of code got hairy pretty quick. So my question is how should I approach this from here? I'm not tied to any one language, though I'm partial to python/javascript. Thoughts: Could be done as a set of scripts that include a scheduling mechanism with one script per bit of logic...but the idea just feels wrong to me. Building it as a daemon could be helpful, but still unsure what to do about dozens of if-else statements for detecting the current time

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• How to fix this navigation issue in my site?

  - by David

  First off I use webs.com for the creation of my site. I have a very basic layout. List of links of the left and content on the right with a heading up top. Now in my list of links every link is an article that I wrote, I have about 25 links going down the left hand side of my site. Problem is when I try out new themes that support horizontal navigation as opposed to vertical navigation I get either a messy overflow of links Or a link called "more" which lists the rest of the articles in a drop down-list across my site. What I wish I had was a simple horizontal navigation like" "home, about, articles" and when the user clicks on articles it would then bring them to a page containing all my articles there. I would prefer it to be in a table like display. That way is not a long list. Anyways any ideas on how I can fix this issue im having? Please let me know if you need more information.

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• Consistency vs. Usability?

  - by dsimcha

  When designing an API, consistency often aids usability. However, sometimes they conflict where an extra API feature can be added to streamline a common case. It seems like there's somewhat of a divide over what to do here. Some designs (the Java standard library come to mind) favor consistency even if it makes common cases more verbose. Others (the Python standard library comes to mind) favor usability even if it means treating the common case as "special" to make it easier. What is your opinion on how consistency and usability should be balanced?

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• How should compound words be handled when coding? Is there a definitive list of compound words? [closed]

  - by Ray

  QUESTION: How should you handle compound words when programming? Are there any good lists available online for developers of generally accepted technology-related compound words? I can see how this is highly ambiguous, so should I just use common-sense? EXAMPLE: I would be inclined to do this: filename NOT FileName or login NOT LogIn However, the microsoft documentation indicates that filename is not compound. So I wonder, is there a more definitive source? See also, this english.stackexchange discussion on filename. Under the section "Capitalization Rules for Compound Words and Common Terms" located here: Microsoft .NET Capitalization Conventions only offers a limited introduction into the topic, and leaves it up to the developer to use their intuition with the rest.

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• Is acoustic fingerprinting too broad for one audio file only?

  - by IBG

  We were looking for some topics related to audio analysis and found acoustic fingerprinting. As it is, it seems like the most famous application for it is for identification of music. Enter our manager, who requested us to research and possible find an algorithm or existing code that we can use for this very simple approach (like it's easy, source codes don't show up like mushrooms): Always-on app for listening Compare the audio patterns to a single audio file (assume sound is a simple beep) If beep is detected, send notification to server With a flow this simple, do you think acoustic fingerprinting is a broad approach to use? Should we stop and take another approach? Where to best start? We haven't started anything yet (on the development side) on this regard, so I want to get other opinion if this is pursuit is worth it or moot.

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• Is it a good approach to rely on 3rd party software ( not library )?

  - by gunbuster363

  We have program using a call to a winzip program or 7zip commandline tool to zip some files. Once I accidentally uninstall winzip on my computer and making one of our program( created by the programmer already left ) crashed. So we cannot uninstall the winzip program. Now I've come to a point which I need to decide a external tool for gzip in windows or I make a java program which I can call to gzip the file. Obviously a external tool such as 7z is convenient and we can avoid some extra coding with java. On the contrary, if 7z is uninstalled accidentally, our program will crash. What do you think?

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• Should a web designer know server-side coding?

  - by Rasoul Zabihi

  We're implementing an CMS based on ASP.NET MVC. Now, any designer should be able to provide themes for this CMS. But to write a theme, they need to be able to modify the generated HTML, thus the concept of View. In other words, they should be capable to either modify current views, or create new views from scratch, to fit their requirements. However, now we're not sure that we're taking the right path. Should a web designer (HTML, CSS, JavaScript + Photoshop) really know about server-side platforms like Razor or PHP, or classic ASP, or anything else?

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• Provide an OnChange event for an internal property which is controlled externally?

  - by NGLN

  For fun and by request I am updating this ImageGrid component, a kind of listbox for images that has a FileNames property of type TStrings. For ease of writing, I have been misusing its FileNames.Objects property for bitmap storage. But since the TStrings type suggests that users of the component could or would want to use the Objects property for custom data, e.g. like TListBox.Items, I am rewriting the component to store the bitmaps elsewhere and leave FileNames.Objects untouched for unknown future usage. Now I am wondering whether to provide an OnChange event. And if so, whether to fire it when one or more FileNames.Objects changes. Trying to answer it myself, I dove in Delphi's own VCL and stumbled on: TMemo: has an OnChange event, but ignores Lines.Objects TListBox: has no OnChange event, but is capable of storing Items.Objects TStringGrid: has no OnChange event, but is capable of storing Objects, Rows.Objects, Cols.Objects So now I am somewhat puzzeled, because I cannot imagine Borland's developers didn't add events for several Objects properties out of ease. Sure, when a user changes a FileNames.Object in my component, he knows he does and could implement appropriate interaction himself. But wouldn't it be convenient when the component does automatically? What would you expect from this component in this regard?

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• Creating new games on Android and/or iPhone

  - by James Clifton

  I have a succesfull facebook poker game that is running very nicely, now some people have asked if I can port this to other platforms - mainly mobile devices (and I have been asked to make a tablet version, do I really need a seperate version?) I am currently a PHP programmer (and game designer) and I simply dont' have the time to learn Android and other languages - so I have decided to pay third parties to program them (if viable). The information I need to know is what programming language is needed for the following four devices - Android mobile phone, iPhone, iPad and tablets? Can they all run off a central sql database? If they can't then i'm not interested :( Do any of these run FLASH? Have I covered all my main bases here? For example if a person programs for a ANDROID mobile phone is that to much differant to an ANDROID tablet? They will have slightly differant graphics (because the tablet has a greater screen area might as well use it) but do they need to be started from scratch? Same goes for iPhone/iPad, do they really need to be programmed differantly if the only differance is the graphics?

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