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• You know you're a "version control avoider" if [closed]

  - by kmote

  I'm in the process of trying to introduce Version/Revision Control to a team of developers who have never used it. I'll be giving a presentation that I hope will be a persuasive explanation of the importance of Version Control -- the benefits of using it and the liabilities of avoiding it. I'd like to kick it off with an amusing but instructive list modelled after the "redneck" line of jokes. Can anyone help me add to this list? "You know you're a Version Control Avoider if..." You have a bunch of files or folders with names like Engine_05212012_works_old[2].cpp You've had to explain to your boss how you accidentally overwrote production code. I don't consider myself terribly witty, but I think a little humor could be helpful in this situation. Any ideas for how to extend this list? [Bonus points if you can suggest a better moniker than "Version Control Avoider"]

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• Regulation of the software industry

  - by Flexo

  Every few years someone proposes tighter regulation for the software industry. This IEEE article has been getting some attention lately on the subject. If software engineers who write programs for systems that expose the public to physical or financial risk knew they would be tested on their competence, the thinking goes, it would reduce the flaws and failures in code—and maybe save a few lives in the bargain. I'm skeptical about the value and merit of this. To my mind it looks like a land grab by those that proposed it. The quote that clinches that for me is: The exam will test for basic knowledge, not mastery of subject matter because the big failures (e.g. THERAC-25) seem to be complex, subtle issues that "basic knowledge" would never be sufficient to prevent. Ignoring any local issues (such as existing protections of the title Engineer in some jurisdictions): The aims are noble - avoid the quacks/charlatans1 and make that distinction more obvious to those that buy their software. Can tighter regulation of the software industry ever achieve it's original goal? 1 Exactly as regulation of the medical profession was intended to do.

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• Modular Database Structures

  - by John D

  I have been examining the code base we use in work and I am worried about the size the packages have grown to. The actual code is modular, procedures have been broken down into small functional (and testable) parts. The issue I see is that we have 100 procedures in a single package - almost an entire domain model. I had thought of breaking these packages down - to create sub domains that are centered around the procedure relationships to other objects. Group a bunch of procedures that have 80% of their relationships to three tables etc. The end result would be a lot more packages, but the packages would be smaller and I feel the entire code base would be more readable - when procedures cross between two domain models it is less of a struggle to figure which package it belongs to. The problem I now have is what the actual benefit of all this would really be. I looked at the general advantages of modularity: 1. Re-usability 2. Asynchronous Development 3. Maintainability Yet when I consider our latest development, the procedures within the packages are already reusable. At this advanced stage we rarely require asynchronous development - and when it is required we simply ladder the stories across iterations. So I guess my question is if people know of reasons why you would break down classes rather than just the methods inside of classes? Right now I do believe there is an issue with these mega packages forming but the only benefit I can really pin down to break them down is readability - something that experience gained from working with them would solve.

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• Balancing full time work and personal coding projects.

  - by pllee

  I am nearing the end of developing the major pieces of my website that I have been working on in my spare time for the last 3 months. My goal is to get it released by the end of next month and hopefully start making some money on it. Unfortunately the next step will be to write a lot of specific data handling and ui code that I can see becoming very tedious and boring. When I was first started the project I was able to find time for working on it easily, it was interesting and writing the back-end was new. Once I got to the start of writing stuff that I know and do at work (ui), it seemed harder and harder to make myself work on the project, sometimes the last thing I want to do when I get home from work is code again. Anyone in the same situation? Any tips on how to find time and effort for side projects without burning out? Any tips on staying on the right track?

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• How do you break down a new project with an existing mega PHP site?

  - by Caveatrob

  I've got to dive into a very large PHP site and have my first client meeting today. All they gave me so far was the URL. How do you guys go about gathering/structuring/documenting and preparing for a new project in a PHP environment? What things do you ask for up front? PS - I know there are other general questions about this but I want a PHP-flavored one, including tools (even if universal) and approaches. Thanks!! I'm excited but also scared.

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• What's the proper term for a function inverse to a constructor - to unwrap a value from a data type?

  - by Petr Pudlák

  Edit: I'm rephrasing the question a bit. Apparently I caused some confusion because I didn't realize that the term destructor is used in OOP for something quite different - it's a function invoked when an object is being destroyed. In functional programming we (try to) avoid mutable state so there is no such equivalent to it. (I added the proper tag to the question.) Instead, I've seen that the record field for unwrapping a value (especially for single-valued data types such as newtypes) is sometimes called destructor or perhaps deconstructor. For example, let's have (in Haskell): newtype Wrap = Wrap { unwrap :: Int } Here Wrap is the constructor and unwrap is what? The questions are: How do we call unwrap in functional programming? Deconstructor? Destructor? Or by some other term? And to clarify, is this/other terminology applicable to other functional languages, or is it used just in the Haskell? Perhaps also, is there any terminology for this in general, in non-functional languages? I've seen both terms, for example: ... Most often, one supplies smart constructors and destructors for these to ease working with them. ... at Haskell wiki, or ... The general theme here is to fuse constructor - deconstructor pairs like ... at Haskell wikibook (here it's probably meant in a bit more general sense), or newtype DList a = DL { unDL :: [a] -> [a] } The unDL function is our deconstructor, which removes the DL constructor. ... in The Real World Haskell.

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• Functional programming compared to OOP with classes

  - by luckysmack

  I have been interested in some of the concepts of functional programming lately. I have used OOP for some time now. I can see how I would build a fairly complex app in OOP. Each object would know how to do things that object does. Or anything it's parents class does as well. So I can simply tell Person().speak() to make the person talk. But how do I do similar things in functional programming? I see how functions are first class items. But that function only does one specific thing. Would I simply have a say() method floating around and call it with an equivalent of Person() argument so I know what kind of thing is saying something? So I can see the simple things, just how would I do the comparable of OOP and objects in functional programming, so I can modularize and organize my code base? For reference, my primary experience with OOP is Python, PHP, and some C#. The languages that I am looking at that have functional features are Scala and Haskell. Though I am leaning towards Scala. Basic Example (Python): Animal(object): def say(self, what): print(what) Dog(Animal): def say(self, what): super().say('dog barks: {0}'.format(what)) Cat(Animal): def say(self, what): super().say('cat meows: {0}'.format(what)) dog = Dog() cat = Cat() dog.say('ruff') cat.say('purr')

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• How to efficiently protect part of an application with a license

  - by Patrick

  I am working on an application that has many functional parts. When a customer buys the application, he buys the standard functionality, but he can also buy some additional elements of the application for an additional price. All of the elements are part of the same application executable. A license key is used to indicate which of the elements should be accessible in the application. Some of the elements can be easily disabled if the user didn't pay for it. These are typically the modules that you can access via the application's menu. However, some elements give more problems: What if a part of the data model is related to an optional part? Do I build up these data structures in my application so the rest of my application can just assume they're always there? Or do I don't build them, and add checks in the rest of may application? What if some optional part is still useful to perform some internal tasks, but I don't want to expose it to the user externally? What if the marketing responsible wants to make a standard part now an optional part? In all of my application I assume that that part is present, but if it becomes optional, I should add checks on it everywhere in the application. I have some ideas on how to solve some of the problems (e.g. interfaces with dual implementations: one working implementation, and one that is activated if the optional part is not activated). Do you know of any patterns that can be used to solve this kind of problem? Or do you have any suggestions on how to handle this licensing problem? Thanks.

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• What is an appropriate language for expressing initial stages of algorithm refinement?

  - by hydroparadise

  First, this is not a homework assignment, but you can treat it as such ;). I found the following question in the published paper The Camel Has Two Humps. I was not a CS major going to college (I majored in MIS/Management), but I have a job where I find myself coding quite often. For a non-trivial programming problem, which one of the following is an appropriate language for expressing the initial stages of algorithm refinement? (a) A high-level programming language. (b) English. (c) Byte code. (d) The native machine code for the processor on which the program will run. (e) Structured English (pseudocode). What I do know is that you usually want to start your design implementation by writing down pseuducode and then moving/writing in the desired technology (because we all do that, right?) But I never thought about it in terms of refinement. I mean, if you were the original designer, then you might have access to the original pseudocode. But realisticly, when I have to maintain/refactor/refine somebody elses code, I just keep trucking with the language it currently resides in. Anybody have a definitive answer to this? As a side note, I did a quick scan of the paper as I havn't read every single detail. It presents various score statistics, can't find where the answers are with the paper.

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• What is a good resource for learning how the .Net Framework works? [on hold]

  - by Till Death Developer

  I've been developing web apps, for a while now so i know how to get the job done, what i don't know is how every thing really works, i know some but the rest i can't get a grasp on like how abstract works, what happens when i instantiate an object from a class that inherits from an abstract class?, where things get stored Heap vs Stack?, in other words the Interview questions that i suck at, so any advice would be great, books, videos, online courses, whatever you can provide would really help me.

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• Why is Cocoa using an old version of Unicode? [closed]

  - by Randy Marsh

  While I was searching for something in the Apple docs, I stumble on this: illegalCharacterSet Returns a character set containing values in the category of Non-Characters or that have not yet been defined in version 3.2 of the Unicode standard. On the Unicode website, I find that the latest version is 6.1.0. That's a lot of major versions higher than what Cocoa supports. Does somebody know why Apple doesn't upgrade their framework? My more important question is: Are there problems for not doing having support for Unicode 3.2+? Will I have problems reading Unicode files created on other systems with a more recent version of Unicode?

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• what technologies or functionalites can be considered as innovative nowadays?

  - by ts01

  For some unholy reasons (New Year maybe?) I was charged with listing all "innovative things" which my company is doing internally in IT. So, my first question is of course: what can be considered nowadays "innovative" in software, in terms of a/ technologies - like, lets say, cloud computing was 10 years ago or facial recognition 15 years ago b/ functionalities - ie. migration of desktop application to web (last decade) or using voice to control computer (last century) My personal focus is on web, but I am also curious of opinions from others domains.

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• is there any elegant way to analyze an engineer's process?

  - by NewAlexandria

  Plenty of sentiment exists that measuring commits is inappropriate. Has any study been done that tries to draw in more sources than commits - such as: browsing patterns IDE work (pre-commit) idle time multitasking I can't think of an easy way to do these measures, but I wonder if any study has been done. On a personal note, I do believe that reflection on one's own 'metrics' could be valuable regardless of (or in the absence of) using these for performance eval. I.E. an un-biased way to reflect on your habits. But this is a discussion matter beyond Q&A.

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• When to use functional programming approach and when not? (in Java)

  - by john smith optional

  let's assume I have a task to create a Set of class names. To remove duplication of .getName() method calls for each class, I used org.apache.commons.collections.CollectionUtils and org.apache.commons.collections.Transformer as follows: Snippet 1: Set<String> myNames = new HashSet<String>(); CollectionUtils.collect( Arrays.<Class<?>>asList(My1.class, My2.class, My3.class, My4.class, My5.class), new Transformer() { public Object transform(Object o) { return ((Class<?>) o).getName(); } }, myNames); An alternative would be this code: Snippet 2: Collections.addAll(myNames, My1.class.getName(), My2.class.getName(), My3.class.getName(), My4.class.getName(), My5.class.getName()); So, when using functional programming approach is overhead and when it's not and why? Isn't my usage of functional programming approach in snippet 1 is an overhead and why?

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• Making a design for a Problem [closed]

  - by Vaibhav Agarwal

  I have written many codes using OOPS and I am still to understand when is a code good enough to be accepted by experts. The thought procedure of every man is different and so is the design. My question is should I do something in particular to design my programs in such a way that they are good enough to be accepted by people. Other thing I have also read Head First Object Oriented Design but at last I feel that the way they design the problems is much different I would have designed them.

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• Reaching Intermediate Programming Status

  - by George Stocker

  I am a software engineer that's had positions programming in VBA (though I dare not consider that 'real' experience, as it was trial and error!), Perl w/ CGI, C#, and ASP.NET. The latter two are post-undergraduate, with my entrance into the 'real world'. I'm 2 years out of college, and have had 5 years of experience (total) across the languages I've mentioned. However, when it comes to my resume, I can only put 2 years down for C#, and less than a year down for ASP.NET. I feel like I know C#, but I still have to spend time going 'What does this method do?', whereas some of the more senior level engineers can immediately say, "Oh, Method X does this, without ever having looked at that method before." So I know empirically that there's a gulf there, but I'm not exactly sure how to bridge it. I've started programming in Project Euler, and I picked up a book on design patterns, but I still feel like I spend each day treading water, instead of moving forward. That isn't to say that I don't feel like I've made progress, it just means that as far as I come each day, I still see the mountain top way off in the distance. My question is this: How did you overcome this plateau? How long did it take you? What methods can you suggest to assist me in this? I've read through Code Complete, The Mythical Man Month, and CLR via C#, 2nd edition -- my question is: What do I do now? Edit: I just found this question on projects for an intermediate level programmer. I think it adds to the discussion (though it does not supplant my question). As such, I'm adding it to the question as a "For More Information".

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• Can/should one record unstructured suggestions and feedback in an issue tracker?

  - by Ian Mackinnon

  I'd like to advocate the use of issue-tracking software within an organisation that currently does not use it. But there's one aspect of their situation for which I'm unsure of what to suggest: their projects frequently receive informal verbal feedback or casual comments in meetings or in passing from a wide group of interested parties, and all this information needs to be recorded. Most of these messages are noise, but they're vital to record and share with developers for two reasons: Good suggestions often come out of this process. It can be necessary to have evidence of clients' comments when they forget previous instructions or change their mind. Is this the sort of information that should be stored in an issue-tracking system, or kept apart in a separate solution? Are there issue-tracking systems that have particularly good support for this sort of unstructured information?

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• Maintaining a main project line with satellite projects

  - by NickLarsen

  Some projects I work on have a main line of features, but are customizable per customer. Up until now those customizations have been implemented as preferences, but now there are 2 problems with the system... The settings page is getting out of control with features. There are probably some improvements that could be made to the settings UI, but regardless, it is quite cumbersome setting up new instances for new customers. Customers have started asking for customizations which would be more easily maintained as separate threads instead of having tons of customizations code. Optimally I am envisioning some kind of source control in which features are either in the main project line and customizations per customer are maintained in a repo per customer set up. The customizations per project would need to remain separate but if a bug is found and fixed in a particular project, I would need to percolate the fix back to the main line and into all of the other customer repos. The problem is I have never seen this done before, and before spending time trying to find source control that can accommodate this scenario and implement it, I figure it best to ask if anyone has something less complicated or knows of a source control product which can handle this with very little hair pulling.

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• Need advice for approach for a web-based app that loads excel worksheet but exposes only the charts

  - by John

  I'm looking for suggestions on the Visual Studio approach to take for a web application that is in the conceptual stage. My environment has a lot of tools: Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard 64bit Visual Studio 2010 Professional Edition Sharepoint 2010 Server Enterprise Edition SQL Server 2008 R2 Office 2010 Professional I know I will need this app to retrieve data from a database (or a web service - not sure exactly at this point). The data needs to be placed in an Excel workbook dynamically. The app will need to have a nice user interface (standard web controls - perhaps with some Javascript effects). The Excel ribbon and worksheet grid will need to be hidden. Some web control(s) will cause the Excel chart(s) to be rendered. I am thinking this sounds like Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) so as to leverage .Net and hide Excel. Can you offer suggestions regarding: One ASP.Net Web App Project One Class Library Project for Excel or perhaps which one of the several different Excel 2010 project types (addin, template, document) Would Excel Services for Sharepoint be useful (or required) ? I am feeling a little overwhelmed with so many choices at this early stage of conceptualizing the app. Can you suggest some ideas for this sort of thing? Also, I am a bit more experienced with C# but I've read VB.Net is better for work with the Excel object model. What are general advises with regard to tool choice and overall approach tradeoffs?

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• What time planning tools do you use?

  - by sbrattla

  I'm trying to get a better overview of my tasks, and I'm looking for a tool which would let me enter tasks (everything from 2 hour tasks to 2 week tasks) and then simply let me organize these tasks on a timeline. I'm thinking that all tasks would have an estimated duration, and I could then prioritize these tasks by moving them along the timeline to prioritize them. The timeline would then show me the "tasks stack" and how far into the future i'm occupied. I'm not looking for an issue/bug handling system, but simply a tool which lets me get an overview of my tasks. I guess we're more into the category of resource planning. What tools do you use for this?

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• Am I getting Scheme wrong?

  - by nischayn22

  Inspired by the numerous posts about the importance of learning Lisp/Scheme I started to learn Scheme two days back, I am using the book "The little Schemer" and have completed half of it. But I still haven't learned anything new, the book teaches about recursion which I already understand and uses lambda (which I can think of a way to define a function in C). I still haven't got the concept of functional programming (please point to some example of functional compared to normal programming methods in C/C++ so I can get it). Am I learning in the wrong way? or is "The little Schemer" for a newbie in programming and I should look for some other books?

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• Parameterized Django models

  - by mgibsonbr

  In principle, a single Django application can be reused in two or more projects, providing functionality relevent to both. That implies that the same database structure (tables and relations) will be re-created identically in different databases, and most times this is not a problem (assuming the projects/databases are unrelated - for instance when someone downloads a complete app to use in their own projects). Sometimes, however, the models must be "tweaked" a little to better fit the problem needs. This can be accomplished by forking the app, but I wondered if there wouldn't be a better option in cases where the app designer can anticipate the most common customizations. For instance, if I have a model that could relate to another as one-to-one or one-to-many, I could specify the unique property as a parameter, that can be specified in the project's settings: class This(models.Model): other = models.ForeignKey(Other, unique=settings.OTHER_TO_THIS) Or if a model can relate to many others, I could create an intermediate table for each of them (thus enforcing referential integrity) instead of using generic fks: for related in settings.MODELS_RELATED_TO_OTHER: model_name = '%s_Other' % related globals()[model_name] = type(model_name, (models.Model,) { me:models.ForeignKey(find_model_class(related)), other:models.ForeignKey(Other), # Some other properties all intersection tables must have }) Etc. Let me stress out that I'm not proposing to change the models at runtime nor anything like that; once the parameters were defined and syncdb called for the first time, those parameters are not to be changed again (unless you're doing a schema migration). Is this a good design? Are there better ways to accomplish the same thing, or maybe drawbacks I coulnd't anticipate? This technique is meant to be used sparingly (only on apps meant to be reused in wildly different contexts, and only when a specific need of customization can be detected while the app model is being designed).

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• How to market yourself as a software developer?

  - by karlphillip

  I have noticed that this is a frequent issue among younglings from technical areas such as ours. In the beginning of our careers we simply don't know how to sell ourselves to our employers, and random guy #57 (who is a programmer, but not as good as you - technically) ends up getting a raise/promotion just because he knows how to communicate and market himself better than you. Many have probably seen this happen in the past, and most certainly many more will in the future. What kind of skill/ability (either technical, or of other nature) do you think is relevant to point out when doing a job interview or asking for a raise, besides listing all the programming languages and libraries you know?

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• How many hours can you be really productive per day? How?

  - by fzwo

  I find that I'm having a great deal of trouble staying alert 8 hours per day. I've heard of people who've negotiated work contracts of just 4 hours/day, arguing that they won't be able to do much more in eight hours. I am often overwhelmed with drowsiness, boredom, distraction. Some days, I seem to blaze through eight hours in a furious explosion of productivity; other days, I hardly get anything done at all. Most days, it's somewhere in between, and I feel bad for wasting a lot of time because I can't muster the concentration to be my best throughout much of the day. I'd like to hear your experiences (tell me I'm not alone!), and, if found, your solutions to this dilemma. Are you productive 8 hours/day almost every day? How?

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• What is the situation about OpenGL under Ubuntu Unity and Gnome3?

  - by user827992

  In a GNU/linux distribution is usually installed Xorg as main graphical server, it operates with a client-server logic, a special windows is designate as desktop environment and this special windows can handle all the eyecandy stuff like decorations, icons and effects. The problem is that the latest UI heavily relies on hardware acceleration, Unity is an overlay on Compiz and the Gnome-shell also require an active driver for the GPU to work well: the problem is: on the same OS I can find multiple implementations of OpenGL who is handling my OpenGL buffer? how the OpenGL buffer is managed compared to the other windows? how can I be sure that my OpenGL implementation is glued to the hardware and is not related to the client-server logic of Xorg? For example I have tried the clutter library and I have only experienced problems under both Unity and GTK/Gnome, no problem under other OS.

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