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• How does one unit test an algorithm

  - by Asa Baylus

  I was recently working on a JS slideshow which rotates images using a weighted average algorithm. Thankfully, timgilbert has written a weighted list script which implements the exact algorithm I needed. However in his documentation he's noted under todos: "unit tests!". I'd like to know is how one goes about unit testing an algorithm. In the case of a weighted average how would you create a proof that the averages are accurate when there is the element of randomness? Code samples of similar would be very helpful to my understanding.

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• How to diagram custom programming languages, non textual?

  - by Adam

  I've used and created domain-specific languages before, plenty of times (e.g. using yacc/lex). Normally we'd start with grammar written in BNF, and a bunch of keywords. This is easy to do, easy to share. Recently, I've started working with diagrammatic programming languages - closest parallel is circuit-diagrams in electronics, where it's very difficult to express ideas in text, but very easy to express them in wiring-diagrams. This is a new and novel problem for me: how to efficiently express these mini-languages, and share concepts in them with colleagues? (i.e. how to whiteboard-program within them. Actual programming is easy - you have physical components to hand) Are there tools for this? Or good/best practices (e.g. equivalent of "always use BNF as starting point for your new DSL, and use tools like yacc to generate the parser, compiler, etc"). My googlefu is proving weak - all I get is false positives for wiring diagrams, and UML editors (since these are custom languages, UML doesn't seem to help)

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• An alternative to multiple inheritance when creating an abstraction layer?

  - by sebf

  In my project I am creating an abstraction layer for some APIs. The purpose of the layer is to make multi-platform easier, and also to simplify the APIs to the feature set that I need while also providing some functionality, the implementation of which will be unique to each platform. At the moment, I have implemented it by defining and abstract class, which has methods which creates objects that implement interfaces. The abstract class and these interfaces define the capabilities of my abstraction layer. The implementation of these in my layer should of course be arbitrary from the POV view of my application, but I have done it, for my first API, by creating chains of subclasses which add more specific functionality as the features of the APIs they expose become less generic. An example would probably demonstrate this better: //The interface as seen by the application interface IGenericResource { byte[] GetSomeData(); } interface ISpecificResourceOne : IGenericResource { int SomePropertyOfResourceOne {get;} } interface ISpecificResourceTwo : IGenericResource { string SomePropertyOfResourceTwo {get;} } public abstract class MyLayer { ISpecificResourceOne CreateResourceOne(); ISpecificResourceTwo CreateResourceTwo(); void UseResourceOne(ISpecificResourceOne one); void UseResourceTwo(ISpecificResourceTwo two); } //The layer as created in my library public class LowLevelResource : IGenericResource { byte[] GetSomeData() {} } public class ResourceOne : LowLevelResource, ISpecificResourceOne { int SomePropertyOfResourceOne {get{}} } public class ResourceTwo : ResourceOne, ISpecificResourceTwo { string SomePropertyOfResourceTwo {get {}} } public partial class Implementation : MyLayer { override UseResourceOne(ISpecificResourceOne one) { DoStuff((ResourceOne)one); } } As can be seen, I am essentially trying to have two inheritance chains on the same object, but of course I can't do this so I simulate the second version with interfaces. The thing is though, I don't like using interfaces for this; it seems wrong, in my mind an interface defines a contract, any class that implements that interface should be able to be used where that interface is used but here that is clearly not the case because the interfaces are being used to allow an object from the layer to masquerade as something else, without the application needing to have access to its definition. What technique would allow me to define a comprehensive, intuitive collection of objects for an abstraction layer, while their implementation remains independent? (Language is C#)

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• What would the ultimate developer training class look like?

  - by user652273

  I think today's typical/traditional 3-5 days developer training classes aren't so great, as you tend to forget half of it shortly after. It's too much one way communication and not enough interaction. Also brain research has shown that this kind of setup is usually not optimal for efficient learning. For clarification, I am referring to professional, commercial, paid classes. However this could also be applied for any kind of studies. How could the ultimate developer training package be setup to really make sure you learn what you are supposed to learn? Would that be more: Multimedia? Exercises? Homeworks? Spread out over time instead of 3-5 compact days? Group projects?

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• Scheme vs Haskell for an Introduction to Functional Programming?

  - by haziz

  I am comfortable with programming in C and C#, and will explore C++ in the future. I may be interested in exploring functional programming as a different programming paradigm. I am doing this for fun, my job does not involve computer programming, and am somewhat inspired by the use of functional programming, taught fairly early, in computer science courses in college. Lambda calculus is certainly beyond my mathematical abilities, but I think I can handle functional programming. Which of Haskell or Scheme would serve as a good intro to functional programming? I use emacs as my text editor and would like to be able to configure it more easily in the future which would entail learning Emacs Lisp. My understanding, however, is that Emacs Lisp is fairly different from Scheme and is also more procedural as opposed to functional. I would likely be using "The Little Schemer" book, which I have already bought, if I pursue Scheme (seems to me a little weird from my limited leafing through it). Or would use the "Learn You a Haskell for Great Good" if I pursue Haskell. I would also watch the Intro to Haskell videos by Dr Erik Meijer on Channel 9. Any suggestions, feedback or input appreciated. Thanks. P.S. BTW I also have access to F# since I have Visual Studio 2010 which I use for C# development, but I don't think that should be my main criteria for selecting a language.

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• Is Cygwin or Windows Command Prompt preferable for getting a consistent terminal experience for development?

  - by Paul Hazen

  The question: Which is better, installing cygwin or one of its cousins on all my windows machines to have a consistent terminal experience across all my development machines, or becoming well trained in the skill of mentally switching from linux terminal to windows command prompt? Systems I use: OSX Lion on a Macbook Air Windows 8 on a desktop Windows 7 on the same desktop Fedora 16 on the same desktop What I'm trying to accomplish Configure an entirely consistent (or consistent enough) terminal experience across all my machines. "enough" in this context is clearly subjective. Please be clear in your answer why the configuration you suggest is consistent enough. One more thing to keep in mind: While I do write a lot of code intended to run on Windows (actually code that runs on Windows Phone which necessitates a windows machine), I also write a lot of Java code, and prefer to do so in vim. I test a local repo in Java on my windows machine, and push to another test machine running ubuntu later in the development stage. When I push to the ubuntu machine, I'm exclusively in terminal, since I'm accessing it via SSH. Summary, with more accurate question: Is there a good way to accomplish what I'm trying to do, or is it better to get accustomed to remembering different commands based on the system I'm on? Which (if either) is considered "best practice" by the development community? Alternatively, for a consistent development experience, would it be better to write all my code SSHed into another machine, and move things to windows for compile / build only when I needed to? That seems like too much work... but could be a solution. Update: While there are insightful responses below, I have yet to hear an answer that talks about why any given solution is superior. Cygwin/GnuWin32 is certainly a way to accomplish a similar experience on all platforms, but since I'm just learning all things command line, I don't want to set myself up to do a lot of relearning/unlearning in the future. Cygwin/GnuWin32 has its peculiarities I would imagine, and being aware of how that set up works on Windows is a learning curve. Additionally, using Cygwin/GnuWin32 robs me of learning the benefits of PowerShell. As a newcomer to working in a command line, which path should I choose to minimize having to relearn/unlearn things in the future? or as my first paragraph poses: [is it better to use Cygwin] ...or [become] well trained in the skill of mentally switching from linux terminal to windows command prompt?

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• How to convince my boss to improve code quality?

  - by Vimvq1987

  The place I'm working for is a service provider. We have a lot of services, which are written to deal with deadline, so their code are really terrible: No coding convention, everyone codes in his own style No unit testing (which is really bad) No refactoring (which is truly worse) No automation build/deployment etc and these code are used again and again, so bad code continue to spread all over my department. I really want to set up a standard quality for our code, by requiring everyone to follow "rules": every line of code which does not follow convention will be rejected, and every function of code which does not pass unit testing will not be committed,...But I don't know how to convince my boss to allow me to do this. I'm relatively new comer, so inspiring people from my works is really hard, and I think it's easier if my boss support me to this. Thank you very much for your advices

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• Javascript - is this a grey area for anyone else?

  - by Anonymous -

  I have a firm understanding of HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL (and to some extent apache/linux) and find that one of the things missing from my 'web development knowledge base' is javascript - creating richer user interfaces. I'd like to learn Javascript before I look at any frameworks (I've used light javascript/jquery before, but that's besides the point). Can anyone recommend a firm book or online documentation from 'absolute beginner' to 'expert' for javascript? I seem to be finding too many 'display the time' and 'hello world' tutorials...

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• Understanding Data Binding for Windows Phone 7

  - by nikhil

  I want to develop a simple app for the Windows Phone 7 platform. It's basically a vocabulary based game that involves the user moving word tiles from one area to another to score points. I want to know what is the best way of tying the UI to the game's backend? I saw the Windows Phone 7 jumpstart videos, there they touch up on Data Binding but don't really go into any depth. I'm a newbie and don't have any experience with designing the architecture for a phone app, It'd be great if someone could explain what steps I should be taking or guide me to a resource from where I could learn more.

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• Do ORMs enable the creation of rich domain models?

  - by Augusto

  After using Hibernate on most of my projects for about 8 years, I've landed on a company that discourages its use and wants applications to only interact with the DB through stored procedures. After doing this for a couple of weeks, I haven't been able to create a rich domain model of the application I'm starting to build, and the application just looks like a (horrible) transactional script. Some of the issues I've found are: Cannot navigate object graph as the stored procedures just load the minimum amount of data, which means that sometimes we have similar objects with different fields. One example is: we have a stored procedure to retrieve all the data from a customer, and another to retrieve account information plus a few fields from the customer. Lots of the logic ends up in helper classes, so the code becomes more structured (with entities used as old C structs). More boring scaffolding code, as there's no framework that extracts result sets from a stored procedure and puts it in an entity. My questions are: has anyone been in a similar situation and didn't agree with the store procedure approch? what did you do? Is there an actual benefit of using stored procedures? appart from the silly point of "no one can issue a drop table". Is there a way to create a rich domain using stored procedures? I know that there's the posibility of using AOP to inject DAOs/Repositories into entities to be able to navigate the object graph. I don't like this option as it's very close to voodoo.

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• What is the best C++ interview question?

  - by David Thielen

  If you could ask a C++ programmer one question to measure their C++ skills, what would it be? The question I think is best is: Can you call "delete this;" inside a member function? (I put this as a link so you can think it through first, then go to The Best C++ Interview Question – Ever! to see the correct answer.) I don't ask this because I expect most people to know the answer. If they did it would not be that useful a question. I ask to see if they can work their way to the correct answer and how they do so.

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• Language Niches and Niche Libraries

  - by Roman A. Taycher

  "Everyone Knows" ... ... that c is widely used for low level programs in large part because operating system/device apis are usually in c. ... that Java is widely used for enterprise applications in large part because of enterprise libraries and ide support. ... that ruby is widely used for webapps thanks in large part because of rails and its library ecosytem But lets go into to details what are the specific niches and subniches. Especially with respect to libraries. Where might you embed lua for application scripting versus python. Where would you use Java vs C#. Which languages do different scientists use? Also which languages have libraries for these subniches? Things like bioperl/scipy/Incanter. Please no flamewars about how nice each language or environment is. This is where they used. Also no complaints about marketing/PHBs. (Manually migrated) I asked this question again after it was closed on stackoverflow.com

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• Named arguments (parameters) as a readability aid

  - by Damian Mehers

  A long time ago I programmed a lot in ADA, and it was normal to name arguments when invoking a function - SomeObject.DoSomething(SomeParameterName = someValue); Now that C# supports named arguments, I'm thinking about reverting to this habit in situations where it might not be obvious what an argument means. You might argue that it should always be obvious what an argument means, but if you have a boolean argument, and callers are passing in "true" or "false" then qualifying the value with the name makes the call site more readable. contentFetcher.DownloadNote(note, manual : true); I guess I could create Enums instead of using true or false (Manual, Automatic in this case). What do you think about occasionally using named arguments to make code easier to read?

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• How to improve testing your own code

  - by Peter

  Today I checked in a change on some code which turned out to be not working at all due to something rather stupid yet very crucial. I feel really bad about it and I hope I finally learn something from it. The stupid thing is, I've done these things before and I always tell myself, next time I won't be so stupid... Then it happens again and I feel even worse about it. I know you should keep your chin up and learn from your mistakes but here's the thing: I try to improve myself, I just don't see how I can prevent these things from happening. So, now I'm asking you guys: Do you have certain groundrules when testing your code?

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• What are the downsides of leaving automation tags in production code?

  - by joshin4colours

  I've been setting up debug tags for automated testing of a GWT-based web application. This involves turning on custom debug id tags/attributes for elements in the source of the app. It's a non-trivial task, particularly for larger, more complex web applications. Recently there's been some discussion of whether enabling such debug ids is a good idea to do across the board. Currently the debug ids are only turned on in development and testing servers, not in production. There have been points raised that enabling debug ids does cause performance to take a hit, and that debug ids in production may lead to security issues. What are benefits of doing this? Are there any significant risks for turning on debug tags in production code?

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• Can non-IT people handle a wiki?

  - by Andrew Heath

  (I'm hoping that some of you will have encountered this issue before and can offer some insights...) My company is looking to improve their market research data management. Current data management style: "Hey Jimbo, where's that picture of our WhatZit 2.0? "yeah I remember that email about that company from that guy, gimme a few minutes to search my Outlook" "who has the newest copy of the Important Competitor's product catalogue? Mine is from '09." ... "Colleen does, and she's on maternity leave. You'll have to call her to get her workstation password..." Desired data management style: data organized neatly by topic (legal, economic, industrial, competitor) for each topic, multiple media types stored together (company product images, press releases, contact info) but still neatly sorted by type data editing histories communal access (no data silos) I was thinking about setting up a department wiki for all users to access. It seems to satisfy the four criteria above, but I'm a little concerned about how user-friendly (read: decipherable to non-technical people) it is for the more advanced features like image galleries, article formatting, and the like. Has anyone here setup a wiki for non-IT people and had it not catch on fire//become a ghost town//look like Geocities? Bonus question: can you see any obvious drawbacks to my choice of MediaWiki (or any other wiki) for solving this problem? Thank you.

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• Are certain problems solved more elegantly with AOP?

  - by Winston Ewert

  I've come across the idea of Aspect Oriented Programming, and I have some concerns with it. The basic idea seems to be that we want to take cross-cutting concerns which aren't well modularized using object and modularize them. That is all very fine and well. But the implementation of AOP seems to be that of modifying code from outside of the module. So, for example, an aspect could be written that changes what happens when a particular object is passed as a parameter in a function. This seems to go directly against the idea of modules. I should not be able to modify a module's behavior from outside of that module, otherwise the whole point of modules are overturned. But aspects seem to be doing exactly that! Basically, aspects seems to be a form of code patching. It may useful for some quick hacks; but, as a general principle perhaps its not something you want to do. Aspect Oriented Programming seems to me taking a bad practice and raising to a general design principle. Is AOP a good practice? Are certain programming problems solved more elegantly with AOP?

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• How do I create my own programming language and a compiler for it

  - by Dave

  I am thorough with programming and have come across languages including BASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL, LISP, LOGO, Java, C++, C, MATLAB, Mathematica, Python, Ruby, Perl, Javascript, Assembly and so on. I can't understand how people create programming languages and devise compilers for it. I also couldn't understand how people create OS like Windows, Mac, UNIX, DOS and so on. The other thing that is mysterious to me is how people create libraries like OpenGL, OpenCL, OpenCV, Cocoa, MFC and so on. The last thing I am unable to figure out is how scientists devise an assembly language and an assembler for a microprocessor. I would really like to learn all of these stuff and I am 15 years old. I always wanted to be a computer scientist some one like Babbage, Turing, Shannon, or Dennis Ritchie. I have already read Aho's Compiler Design and Tanenbaum's OS concepts book and they all only discuss concepts and code in a high level. They don't go into the details and nuances and how to devise a compiler or operating system. I want a concrete understanding so that I can create one myself and not just an understanding of what a thread, semaphore, process, or parsing is. I asked my brother about all this. He is a SB student in EECS at MIT and hasn't got a clue of how to actually create all these stuff in the real world. All he knows is just an understanding of Compiler Design and OS concepts like the ones that you guys have mentioned (ie like Thread, Synchronisation, Concurrency, memory management, Lexical Analysis, Intermediate code generation and so on)

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• Graphic card for parallel programming vs traditional methods

  - by Sambatyon

  With a simple search in amazon one can see that the modern approach for parallel programming is to use your graphic card. However I am still a little bit skeptical about it. My last computer has an 8 core CPU which I need is enough for basic all my parallel needs, if I need more I will probably use MPI through a network using my old machines. All in all, Why and/or when should I use CUDA or another method which uses my graphic card instead of traditional methods like pthreads, java threads, boost threads or the new C++ 11 threads? What about using processes?

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• Open Source sponsored feature development

  - by Suma

  I am considering to sponsor a development of some particular features in some Open Source tools. I would like the results of the work to be available publicly, and if possible, to be included in the main product line. The features are usually something which is of general use, but not very critical, and no one has currently a plan to develop it. For illustration, imagine I would like to use MinGW for Win32 development, but I miss a post mortem debugging option, I would like this feature to be implemented and I am willing to pay $1000 for it. Is there some common way how to proceed, or is this wildly per-project dependent? Are there some general guidelines how to contact the product developers, or are there some common meeting places where smart open source people who might interested to participate in such sponsored development meet, which I should visit to advertise the sponsoring option? Are there some specific ways how to talk about the job to be more attractive to people participating in open source (e.g. it might be more interesting for them to participate in a contest than just to take a payed job, which might have a bit of mundane feel)? Or perhaps is this something which you think has little chance to succeed, because perhaps money has very little value for open source developers? Any tips and experiences from someone who has some experience of open source sponsorhip from any side (sponsor or the developer) are welcome.

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• How to write functionally in a web framework

  - by Kevin Burke

  I love Rich Hickey, Clojure and Haskell and I get it when he talks about functions and the unreliability of side-effecting code. However I work in an environment where nearly all the functions I write have to read from the database, write to the database, make HTTP requests, decrement a user's balance, modify a frontend HTML component based on a click action, return different results based on the URI or the POST body. We also use PHP for the frontend, which is littered with functions like parse_str(), which modifies an object in place. All of these are side-effecting to one degree or another. Given these constraints and the side-effecting nature of the logic I'm coding, what can I do to make my code more reliable and function-able?

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• Jenkins Paramerized Trigger + Copy Artifact

  - by Josh Kelley

  I'm working on setting up Jenkins to handle our release builds. A release build consists of a Windows installer that includes some binaries that must be built on Linux. Here's what I have so far: The Windows portion and Linux portion are set up as separate Jenkins projects. The Windows project is parameterized, taking the Subversion tag to build and release. As part of its build, the Windows project triggers a build of that same Subversion tag for the Linux project (using the Parameterized Trigger plugin) then copies the artifacts from the Linux project (using the Copy Artifact plugin) to the Windows project's workspace so that they can be included in the Windows installer. Where I'm stuck: Right now, Copy Artifact is set up to copy the last successful build. It seems more robust to configure Copy Artifact to copy from the exact build that Parameterized Trigger triggered, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to make that work. There's an option for a "build selector" parameter that I think is intended to help with this, but I can't figure out how it's supposed to be set up (and blindly experimenting with different possibilities is somewhat painful when the build takes an hour or two to find success or failure). How should I set this up? How does build selector work?

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• KISS principle applied to programming language design?

  - by Giorgio

  KISS ("keep it simple stupid", see e.g. here) is an important principle in software development, even though it apparently originated in engineering. Citing from the wikipedia article: The principle is best exemplified by the story of Johnson handing a team of design engineers a handful of tools, with the challenge that the jet aircraft they were designing must be repairable by an average mechanic in the field under combat conditions with only these tools. Hence, the 'stupid' refers to the relationship between the way things break and the sophistication available to fix them. If I wanted to apply this to the field of software development I would replace "jet aircraft" with "piece of software", "average mechanic" with "average developer" and "under combat conditions" with "under the expected software development / maintenance conditions" (deadlines, time constraints, meetings / interruptions, available tools, and so on). So it is a commonly accepted idea that one should try to keep a piece of software simple stupid so that it easy to work on it later. But can the KISS principle be applied also to programming language design? Do you know of any programming languages that have been designed specifically with this principle in mind, i.e. to "allow an average programmer under average working conditions to write and maintain as much code as possible with the least cognitive effort"? If you cite any specific language it would be great if you could add a link to some document in which this intent is clearly expressed by the language designers. In any case, I would be interested to learn about the designers' (documented) intentions rather than your personal opinion about a particular programming language.

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• How exactly is an Abstract Syntax Tree created?

  - by Howcan

  I think I understand the goal of an AST, and I've build a couple of tree structures before, but never an AST. I'm mostly confused because the nodes are text and not number, so I can't think of a nice way to input a token/string as I'm parsing some code. For example, when I looked at diagrams of AST's, the variable and its value were leaf nodes to an equal sign. This makes perfect sense to me, but how would I go about implementing this? I guess I can do it case by case, so that when I stumble upon an "=" I use that as a node, and add the value parsed before the "=" as the leaf. It just seems wrong, because I'd probably have to make cases for tons and tons of things, depending on the syntax. And then I came upon another problem, how is the tree traversed? Do I go all the way down the height, and go back up a node when I hit the bottom, and do the same for it's neighbor? I've seen tons of diagrams on ASTs, but I couldn't find a fairly simple example of one in code, which would probably help.

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• Refactoring and Open / Closed principle

  - by Giorgio

  I have recently being reading a web site about clean code development (I do not put a link here because it is not in English). One of the principles advertised by this site is the Open Closed Principle: each software component should be open for extension and closed for modification. E.g., when we have implemented and tested a class, we should only modify it to fix bugs or to add new functionality (e.g. new methods that do not influence the existing ones). The existing functionality and implementation should not be changed. I normally apply this principle by defining an interface I and a corresponding implementation class A. When class A has become stable (implemented and tested), I normally do not modify it too much (possibly, not at all), i.e. If new requirements arrive (e.g. performance, or a totally new implementation of the interface) that require big changes to the code, I write a new implementation B, and keep using A as long as B is not mature. When B is mature, all that is needed is to change how I is instantiated. If the new requirements suggest a change to the interface as well, I define a new interface I' and a new implementation A'. So I, A are frozen and remain the implementation for the production system as long as I' and A' are not stable enough to replace them. So, in view of these observation, I was a bit surprised that the web page then suggested the use of complex refactorings, "... because it is not possible to write code directly in its final form." Isn't there a contradiction / conflict between enforcing the Open / Closed Principle and suggesting the use of complex refactorings as a best practice? Or the idea here is that one can use complex refactorings during the development of a class A, but when that class has been tested successfully it should be frozen?

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