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• Emacs/Vim/Vi - do they have a place in modern software development ecosystem? [closed]

  - by Anton Gogolev

  Watching all those screencasts (and listening all those podcasts) with more-or-less famous hackers/programmers I hear that many of those use emacs/vi(m) for their daily work. Now, I myself tried using both emacs and vim, and I honestly cannot understand why would anybody use these for any kind of serious development. The most advertised feature is something along the lines of "you'll be able to work with text (meaning cutting, pasting, duplicating, moving, etc) up to ten times faster than with conventional IDEs", but I don't buy that. When has the success of a software project been defined by how fast a programmer can juggle lines in a text editor or by saving a couple of keystrokes here and there? Plugins and extensions? I bet nothing comes close to R# or IDEA in terms of refactoring support ("Rename" refactoring implemented by means of "Search and Replace" is not a refactoring IMO); others are trivial. Ubiquitous and available everywhere? So what? How often do you find yourself editing files over a 300 baud connection on an esoteric *nix installation without a VCS? So here goes: do said editors have a justified place in a modern software development ecosystem?

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• Tried teaching myself to program before college, accidently overwhelmed myself, tips?

  - by Gunnar Keith

  I'm sixteen, I'm overly interested in programming, and I'm currently taking IT classes during my mornings in high school. Last year, I tried teaching myself to code. It was quite exciting, but all I did was watch TheNewBoston's videos on YouTube for Python. After his tutorials, I just did research, made some CMD programs, and that's it. After that, I got cocky and got my feet wet in many other languages. Java, C++, C#, Perl, Ruby... and it overwhelmed me. Which made it less fun to code. I want to go to college for a 2 year programming course. And I want to make writing code my profession. But how do you recommend I attack re-learning it all again? Start with Python? Don't even try? Also, I'm not 100% in math, but I'm good friends with a lot of programmers, who say they suck at math, but manage to code just fine. I'm not looking for negative feedback. I just want the proper head-start on things before college.

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• What's a nice explanation for pointers?

  - by Macneil

  In your own studies (on your own, or for a class) did you have an "ah ha" moment when you finally, really understood pointers? Do you have an explanation you use for beginner programmers that seems particularly effective? For example, when beginners first encounter pointers in C, they might just add &s and *s until it compiles (as I myself once did). Maybe it was a picture, or a really well motivated example, that made pointers "click" for you or your student. What was it, and what did you try before that didn't seem to work? Were any topics prerequisites (e.g. structs, or arrays)? In other words, what was necessary to understand the meaning of &s and *, when you could use them with confidence? Learning the syntax and terminology or the use cases isn't enough, at some point the idea needs to be internalized. Update: I really like the answers so far; please keep them coming. There are a lot of great perspectives here, but I think many are good explanations/slogans for ourselves after we've internalized the concept. I'm looking for the detailed contexts and circumstances when it dawned on you. For example: I only somewhat understood pointers syntactically in C. I heard two of my friends explaining pointers to another friend, who asked why a struct was passed with a pointer. The first friend talked about how it needed to be referenced and modified, but it was just a short comment from the other friend where it hit me: "It's also more efficient." Passing 4 bytes instead of 16 bytes was the final conceptual shift I needed.

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• Why isn't there a culture of paying for frameworks?

  - by Marty Pitt

  One of the side effects of the recent trend of "Lean" startups, and the app store era, is that consumers are more acclimatised to paying small prices for small games / products. Eg.: Online SAAS that charges ~$5 / month (the basecamp style of product) Games which are short, fun, and cheap ($0.99 from the app store This market has been defined by "doing one thing well, and charging people for it." DHH of Rails / 37 Signals fame argues that if your website isn't going to make money, don't bother making it. Why doesn't the same rule apply to frameworks? There are lots of software framework projects out there - many which are mature and feature-rich, which offer developers significant value, yet there doesn't seem to be a market or culture of paying for these. It seems that the projects which do charge money are often things like UI component toolsets, and are often marginalized in favour of free alternatives. Why is this? Surely programmers / businesses see the value in contributing back to projects such as Ruby, Rails, Hibernate, Spring, Ant, Groovy, Gradle, (the list goes on). I'm not suggesting that these frameworks should start charging for anyone who wants to use them, but that there must be a meaningful business model that would allow the developers to earn money from the time they invest developing the framework. Any thoughts as to why this model hasn't emerged / succeeded?

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• How Can I Effectively Interview an Oracle Candidate?

  - by Tim Medora

  First, I browsed through SO for matching questions and didn't find one, but please point me in the right direction if this exact question has already been asked. I work with and around programmers of various skill levels on various platforms. I would consider my skills to be strong in terms of relational database design, query development, and basic performance tuning and administration. I'm mid-level when it comes to database theory. My team is looking to me to ensure that we have the best talent on staff, in this case, an engineer experienced in Oracle administration. To me, a well-rounded database administrator, regardless of platform, should also be competent in developing against the database so that is also a requirement. However my database skills are centralized around SQL Server 200x with experience in a few other products like SAP MaxDB, Access, and FoxPro. How can I thoroughly assess the skills of an Oracle engineer? I can ask high-level database theory questions and talk about routine tasks that are common across platforms, but I want to dig deep enough that I can be confident in the people I hire. Normally, I would alternate very specific questions that have a right/wrong answer with architectural questions that might have several valid answers. Does anyone have an interview template, specific questions, or any other knowledge that they can share? Even knowing the meaningful Oracle-related certifications would be a help. Thank you. EDIT: All the answers have been very helpful so far and I have given upvotes to everyone. I'm surprised that there are already 3 close votes on this question as "off topic". To be clear, I am specifically asking how a MS SQL Server engineer (like myself) can effectively interview a person with different but symbiotic skills. The question has already received specific, technical answers which have improved my own database design and programming skills. If this is more appropriate as a community wiki, please convert it.

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• Is micro-optimisation important when coding?

  - by BozKay

  I recently asked a question on stackoverflow.com to find out why isset() was faster than strlen() in php. This raised questions around the importance of readable code and whether performance improvements of micro-seconds in code were worth even considering. My father is a retired programmer, I showed him the responses and he was absolutely certain that if a coder does not consider performance in their code even at the micro level, they are not good programmers. I'm not so sure - perhaps the increase in computing power means we no longer have to consider these kind of micro-performance improvements? Perhaps this kind of considering is up to the people who write the actual language code? (of php in the above case). The environmental factors could be important - the internet consumes 10% of the worlds energy, I wonder how wasteful a few micro-seconds of code is when replicated trillions of times on millions of websites? I'd like to know answers preferably based on facts about programming. Is micro-optimisation important when coding? EDIT : My personal summary of 25 answers, thanks to all. Sometimes we need to really worry about micro-optimisations, but only in very rare circumstances. Reliability and readability are far more important in the majority of cases. However, considering micro-optimisation from time to time doesn't hurt. A basic understanding can help us not to make obvious bad choices when coding such as if (expensiveFunction() && counter < X) Should be if (counter < X && expensiveFunction()) (example from @zidarsk8) This could be an inexpensive function and therefore changing the code would be micro-optimisation. But, with a basic understanding, you would not have to because you would write it correctly in the first place.

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• Is `break` and `continue` bad programming practice?

  - by Mikhail

  My boss keeps mentioning nonchalantly that bad programmers use break and continue in loops. I use them all the time because they make sense; let me show you the inspiration: function verify(object) { if (object->value < 0) return false; if (object->value > object->max_value) return false; if (object->name == "") return false; ... } The point here is that first the function checks that the conditions are correct, then executes the actual functionality. IMO same applies with loops: while (primary_condition) { if (loop_count > 1000) break; if (time_exect > 3600) break; if (this->data == "undefined") continue; if (this->skip == true) continue; ... } I think this makes it easier to read & debug; but I also don't see a downside. Please comment.

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• Best practices for App Idea ownership and shares

  - by JOG

  I am developing apps on my sparetime. I am the sole developer, and two non-programmer friends of mine provide vision, content, algorithms and ideas. We always agree happily on all the features, todos and prioritizations. But naturally, coding it is the biggest part. When selling, we agree on splitting profit equally, that is 33% each. But version 1.0 naturally does not sell much. And I go on to try to make the app more viral. This includes tons of stuff where the others are of little help. Examples: Adding support for sharing, facebook connect, gameifying, letting users add content, home page, support, maintenance, server services to make it easier for to update content. The list is long. Suddenly I will be doing 100% of a lot of work but only "own" a third of the income. My friends may either "fade out" of the project after 1.0, or they continue to contribute, but with less value and I would rather exchange them for more programmers or graphic designers. The effort they made to version 1.0 is worth a lot to the app and I realize I would have never done it without them. But I am doing all the work in the end. It is hard to negotiate about splitting 90, 5, 5 instead of 33% each, because the idea is still theirs. How to solve this? What are the best practices to regard the ownership of the app? What kind of agreements could I make that make it beneficial and motivational for me to continue developing the app?

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• Music While Coding [closed]

  - by inspectorG4dget

  Hi SO, Generally, while I'm coding, I prefer to listen to some background music. Nothing that'll get me distracted, but something that'll help keep the rhythm and isn't counterproductive when I need to stop coding to debug or to think of a way to solve a small problem that stands in the way of progress. Now, I have read some similar questions on reddit and on SO - specifically: which songs do you find most productive to listen to while coding, Music while programming and more. Sadly a lot of these questions were closed as off-topic, etc. But (1) I don't think this question is off-topic and I think that a lot of programmers can benefit from it. (2) It's a real question. I really want to know what music you guys would recommend because music helps when I'm coding. It's sad that SO: Music to listen to while coding cannot be found and this isn't of much help. I hope this doesn't get closed. PS: I want to turn this into a community wiki, but I don't seem to know how. I'd appreciate any help. Thank you, all. In response to kirk.burleson's comment: In case the question isn't already clear, I'm asking for recommendations/opinions of music to listen to while coding. I would like to know what you listen to when you code so that I can try it too. I am running out of good "coding music" and this is a problem for me because good "coding music" helps me code better.

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• Simple issue tracker for 1-2 developers

  - by devoured elysium

  (I'm not sure whether this pertains to the realm of programmers@se or so@se) I'm currently working mostly alone on a project (in Java). I'm mostly alone as I have an advisor that gives me high level instructions on what to do, and will seldom make any code contribution. She will code in a couple of acceptance tests from time to time, though. I've never used an Issue Tracker before, and was thinking about starting to use one now, as I'd like to have a place where I can log possible bugs I find and keep track of them in a centralized manner. Would it be possible to integrate the issue tracker with Eclipse, better yet. So here are the constraints: It's NOT a open-source project. Our code is not to be shared with anyone! we are and will be using Subversion; we have our own Subversion server and we will keep using this same Subversion server; it must be free; it must allow at least 2 users. What is your advice on what to pick? I'm looking for the simplest solution available!

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• Named output parameters vs return values

  - by Abyx

  Which code is better: // C++ void handle_message(...some input parameters..., bool& wasHandled) void set_some_value(int newValue, int* oldValue = nullptr) // C# void handle_message(...some input parameters..., out bool wasHandled) void set_some_value(int newValue, out int oldValue) or bool handle_message(...some input parameters...) ///< Returns -1 if message was handled //(sorry, this documentation was broken a year ago and we're too busy to fix it) int set_some_value(T newValue) // (well, it's obvious what this function returns, so I didn't write any documentation for it) The first one doesn't have and need any documentation. It's a self-documenting code. Output value clearly says what it means, and it's really hard to make a change like this: - void handle_message(Message msg, bool& wasHandled) { - wasHandled = false; - if (...) { wasHandled = true; ... + void handle_message(Message msg, int& wasHandled) { + wasHandled = -1; + if (...) { wasHandled = ...; With return values such change could be done easily /// Return true if message was handled - bool handle_message(Message msg) { + int handle_message(Message msg) { ... - return true; + return -1; Most of compilers don't (and can't) check documentation written in comments. Programmers also tend to ignore comments while editing code. So, again, the question is: if subroutine has single output value, should it be a procedure with well-named self-documenting output parameter, or should it be a function which returns an unnamed value and have a comment describing it?

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• Does immutability entirely eliminate the need for locks in multi-processor programming?

  - by GlenPeterson

  Part 1 Clearly Immutability minimizes the need for locks in multi-processor programming, but does it eliminate that need, or are there instances where immutability alone is not enough? It seems to me that you can only defer processing and encapsulate state so long before most programs have to actually DO something. If a program performs actions on multiple processors, something needs to collect and aggregate the results. All this involves multi-process communication before, after, and possibly during some transformations. The start and end state of the machines are different. Can this always be done with no locks just by throwing out each object and creating a new one instead of changing the original (a crude view of immutability)? What cases still require locking? I'm interested in both the theoretical/academic answer and the practical/real-world answer. I know a lot of functional programmers like to talk about "no side effect" but in the "real world" everything has a side effect. Every processor click takes time and electricity and machine resources away from other processes. So I understand that there may be more than one perspective to answer this question from. If immutability is safe, given certain bounds or assumptions, I want to know what the borders of the "safety zone" are exactly. Some examples of possible boundaries: I/O Exceptions/errors Interfaces with programs written in other languages Interfaces with other machines (physical, virtual, or theoretical) Special thanks to @JimmaHoffa for his comment which started this question! Part 2 Multi-processor programming is often used as an optimization technique - to make some code run faster. When is it faster to use locks vs. immutable objects? Given the limits set out in Amdahl's Law, when can you achieve better over-all performance (with or without the garbage collector taken into account) with immutable objects vs. locking mutable ones? Summary I'm combining these two questions into one to try to get at where the bounding box is for Immutability as a solution to threading problems.

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• How to break the "php is a bad language" paradigm? [closed]

  - by dukeofgaming

  PHP is not a bad language (or at least not as bad as some may suggest). I had teachers that didn't even know PHP was object oriented until I told them. I've had clients that immediately distrust us when we say we are PHP developers and question us for not using chic languages and frameworks such as Django or RoR, or "enterprise and solid" languages such as Java and ASP.NET. Facebook is built on PHP. There are plenty of solid projects that power the web like Joomla and Drupal that are used in the enterprise and governments. There are frameworks and libraries that have some of the best architectures I've seen across all languages (Symfony 2, Doctrine). PHP has the best documentation I've seen and a big community of professionals. PHP has advanced OO features such as reflection, interfaces, let alone that PHP now supports horizontal reuse natively and cleanly through traits. There are bad programmers and script kiddies that give PHP a bad reputation, but power the PHP community at the same time, and because it is so easy to get stuff done PHP you can often do things the wrong way, granted, but why blame the language?. Now, to boil this down to an actual answerable question: what would be a good and solid and short and sweet argument to avoid being frowned upon and stop prejudice in one fell swoop and defend your honor when you say you are a PHP developer?. (free cookie with teh whipped cream to those with empirical evidence of convincing someone —client or other— on the spot) P.S.: We use Symfony, and the code ends being beautiful and maintainable

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• Using prefix incremented loops in C#

  - by KChaloux

  Back when I started programming in college, a friend encouraged me to use the prefix incrementation operator ++i instead of the postfix i++, citing that there was a slight chance of better performance with no real chance of a downside. I realize this is true in C++, and it's become a general habit that I continue to do. I'm led to believe that it makes little to no difference when used in a loop in C#, regardless of data type. Apparently the ++ operator can't be overridden. Nevertheless, I like the appearance more, and don't see a direct downside to it. It did astonish a coworker just a moment ago though, he made the (fairly logical) assumption that my loop would terminate early as a result. He's a self-taught programmer, and apparently never came across the C++ convention. That made me question whether or not the equivalent behavior of pre- and post-fix increment and decrement operators in loops is well known enough. Is it acceptable for me to continue using ++i in looping constructs because of style preference, even though it has no real performance benefit? Or is it likely to cause confusion amongst other programmers? Note: This is assuming the ++i convention is used consistently throughout all code.

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• Sucking Less Every Year?

  - by AdityaGameProgrammer

  Sucking Less Every Year -Jeff Atwood I had come across this insightful article.Quoting directly from the post I've often thought that sucking less every year is how humble programmers improve. You should be unhappy with code you wrote a year ago. If you aren't, that means either A) you haven't learned anything in a year, B) your code can't be improved, or C) you never revisit old code. All of these are the kiss of death for software developers. How often does this happen or not happen to you? How long before you see an actual improvement in your coding ? month, year? Do you ever revisit Your old code? How often does your old code plague you? or how often do you have to deal with your technical debt. It is definitely very painful to fix old bugs n dirty code that we may have done to quickly meet a deadline and those quick fixes ,some cases we may have to rewrite most of the application/code. No arguments about that. Some of the developers i had come across argued that they were already at the evolved stage where their coding doesn't need improvement or cant get improved anymore. Does this happen? If so how many years into coding on a particular language does one expect this to happen? Related: Ever look back at some of your old code and grimace in pain? Star Wars Moment in Code "Luke! I am your code!" "No! Impossible! It can't be!"

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• My first time in the gambling industry

  - by sfrj

  I am a Java enterprise developer with almost 3 years of professional experience. Soon i am going to have a face to face interview with a company in the gambling industry. I already did successfully a phone screening and now for the personal interview i suppose they will ask me about some kind of white board problem or system design task. I think i am in the right place to ask about this, and would appreciate a lot if someone would give me some tips or share something related to his own experience. The things i am more interested in regarding my interview are: What are the most common challenges for programmers, in this industry? Any idea or suggestion on a white board problem they may ask me? Could you point me to some links where i can find information on the topic or sample problems in this industry?. I personally find this question very interesting not just for me. Also i think, the given answers can help also others in a similar situation. Just what i want to say whit this last comment is: Please avoid, answers like: www.google.com and so on...

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• What Is The Formula for the 3 of 9 Bar Code Alphabet?

  - by Chris Moschini

  Background: 3 of 9 Barcode Alphabet A simple syntax for 3 of 9 bar codes What is the formula behind the alphabet and digits in a 3 of 9 bar code? For example, ASCII has a relatively clear arrangement. Numbers start at 33, capitals at 65, lowercase at 97. From these starting points you can infer the ASCII code for any number or letter. The start point for each range is also a multiple of 32 + 1. Bar codes seem random and lacking sequence. If we use the syntax from the second link, this is the first six characters in 3 of 9: A 100-01 B 010-01 C 110-00 D 001-01 E 101-00 F 011-00 I see no pattern here; what is it? I'm as much interested in the designer's intended pattern behind these as I am in someone devising an algorithm of their own that can give you the above code for a given character based on its sequence. I struggled with where to put this question; is it history, computer science, information science? I chose Programmers because a StackExchange search had the most barcode hits here, and because I wanted to specifically relate it to ASCII to explain what sort of formula/explanation I'm looking for.

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• Are there any concrete examples of where a paralellizing compiler would provide a value-adding benefit?

  - by jamie

  Paul Graham argues that: It would be great if a startup could give us something of the old Moore's Law back, by writing software that could make a large number of CPUs look to the developer like one very fast CPU. ... The most ambitious is to try to do it automatically: to write a compiler that will parallelize our code for us. There's a name for this compiler, the sufficiently smart compiler, and it is a byword for impossibility. But is it really impossible? Can someone provide a concrete example where a paralellizing compiler would solve a pain point? Web-apps don't appear to be a problem: just run a bunch of Node processes. Real-time raytracing isn't a problem: the programmers are writing multi-threaded, SIMD assembly language quite happily (indeed, some might complain if we make it easier!). The holy grail is to be able to accelerate any program, be it MySQL, Garage Band, or Quicken. I'm looking for a middle ground: is there a real-world problem that you have experienced where a "smart-enough" compiler would have provided a real benefit, i.e that someone would pay for? A good answer is one where there is a process where the computer runs at 100% CPU on a single core for a painful period of time. That time might be 10 seconds, if the task is meant to be quick. It might be 500ms if the task is meant to be interactive. It might be 10 hours. Please describe such a problem. Really, that's all I'm looking for: candidate areas for further investigation. (Hence, raytracing is off the list because all the low-hanging fruit have been feasted upon.) I am not interested in why it cannot be done. There are a million people willing to point to the sound reasons why it cannot be done. Such answers are not useful.

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• What's the best practice to do SOA exception handling?

  - by sun1991

  Here's some interesting debate going on between me and my colleague when coming to handle SOA exceptions: On one side, I support what Juval Lowy said in Programming WCF Services 3rd Edition: As stated at the beginning of this chapter, it is a common illusion that clients care about errors or have anything meaningful to do when they occur. Any attempt to bake such capabilities into the client creates an inordinate degree of coupling between the client and the object, raising serious design questions. How could the client possibly know more about the error than the service, unless it is tightly coupled to it? What if the error originated several layers below the service—should the client be coupled to those lowlevel layers? Should the client try the call again? How often and how frequently? Should the client inform the user of the error? Is there a user? By having all service exceptions be indistinguishable from one another, WCF decouples the client from the service. The less the client knows about what happened on the service side, the more decoupled the interaction will be. On the other side, here's what my colleague suggest: I believe it’s simply incorrect, as it does not align with best practices in building a service oriented architecture and it ignores the general idea that there are problems that users are able to recover from, such as not keying a value correctly. If we considered only systems exceptions, perhaps this idea holds, but systems exceptions are only part of the exception domain. User recoverable exceptions are the other part of the domain and are likely to happen on a regular basis. I believe the correct way to build a service oriented architecture is to map user recoverable situations to checked exceptions, then to marshall each checked exception back to the client as a unique exception that client application programmers are able to handle appropriately. Marshall all runtime exceptions back to the client as a system exception, along with the stack trace so that it is easy to troubleshoot the root cause. I'd like to know what you think about this? Thank you.

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• Working with fubar/refuctored code

  - by Keyo

  I'm working with some code which was written by a contractor who left a year ago leaving a number of projects with buggy, disgustingly bad code. This is what I call cowboy PHP, say no more. Ideally I'd like to leave the project as is and never touch it again. Things break, requirements change and it needs to be maintained. Part A needs to be changed. There is a bug I cannot reproduce. Part A is connect to parts B D and E. This kind of work gives me a headache and makes me die a little inside. It kills my motivation and productivity. To be honest I'd say it's affecting my mental health. Perhaps being at the start of my career I'm being naive to think production code should be reasonably clean. I would like to hear from anyone else who has been in this situation before. What did you do to get out of it? I'm thinking long term I might have to find another job. Edit I've moved on from this company now, to a place where idiots are not employed. The code isn't perfect but it's at least manageable and peer reviewed. There are a lot of people in the comments below telling me that software is messy like this. Sure I don't agree with the way some programmers do things but this code was seriously mangled. The guy who wrote it tried to reinvent every wheel he could, and badly. He stopped getting work from us because of his bad code that nobody on the team could stand. If it were easy to refactor I would have. Eventually after many 'just do this small 10minute change' situations had ballooned into hours of lost time (regardless of who on the team was doing the work) my boss finally caved in it was rewritten.

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• Was API hooking done as needed for Stuxnet to work? I don't think so

  - by The Kaykay

  Caveat: I am a political science student and I have tried my level best to understand the technicalities; if I still sound naive please overlook that. In the Symantec report on Stuxnet, the authors say that once the worm infects the 32-bit Windows computer which has a WINCC setup on it, Stuxnet does many things and that it specifically hooks the function CreateFileA(). This function is the route which the worm uses to actually infect the .s7p project files that are used to program the PLCs. ie when the PLC programmer opens a file with .s7p the control transfers to the hooked function CreateFileA_hook() instead of CreateFileA(). Once Stuxnet gains the control it covertly inserts code blocks into the PLC without the programmers knowledge and hides it from his view. However, it should be noted that there is also one more function called CreateFileW() which does the same task as CreateFileA() but both work on different character sets. CreateFileA works with ASCII character set and CreateFileW works with wide characters or Unicode character set. Farsi (the language of the Iranians) is a language that needs unicode character set and not ASCII Characters. I'm assuming that the developers of any famous commercial software (for ex. WinCC) that will be sold in many countries will take 'Localization' and/or 'Internationalization' into consideration while it is being developed in order to make the product fail-safe ie. the software developers would use UNICODE while compiling their code and not just 'ASCII'. Thus, I think that CreateFileW() would have been invoked on a WINCC system in Iran instead of CreateFileA(). Do you agree? My question is: If Stuxnet has hooked only the function CreateFileA() then based on the above assumption there is a significant chance that it did not work at all? I think my doubt will get clarified if: my assumption is proved wrong, or the Symantec report is proved incorrect. Please help me clarify this doubt. Note: I had posted this question on the general stackexchange website and did not get appropriate responses that I was looking for so I'm posting it here.

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• Which reference provides your definition of "elegant" or "beautiful" code?

  - by Donnied

  This question is phrased in a very specific way - it asks for references. There was a similar question posted which was closed because it was considered a duplicate to a good code question. The Programmers FAQ points out that answers should have references - or its just an unproductive sharing of (seemingly) baseless opinions. There is a difference between shortest code and most elegant code. This becomes clear in several seminal texts: Dijkstra, E. W. (1972). The humble programmer. Communications of the ACM, 15(10), 859–866. Kernighan, B. W., & Plauger, P. J. (1974). Programming style: Examples and counterexamples. ACM Comput. Surv., 6(4), 303–319. Knuth, D. E. (1984). Literate programming. The Computer Journal, 27(2), 97–111. doi:10.1093/comjnl/27.2.97 They all note the importance of clarity over brevity. Kernighan & Plauger (1974) provide descriptions of "good" code, but "good code" is certainly not synonymous with "elegant". Knuth (1984) describes the impo rtance of exposition and "excellence of style" to elegant programs. He cites Hoare - who describes that code should be self documenting. Dijkstra (1972) indicates that beautiful programs optimize efficiency but are not opaque. This sort of conversation is qulaitatively different than a random sharing of opinions. Therefore, the question - Which reference provides your definition of "elegant" or "beautiful" code? "Which *reference*" is not subjective - anything else will most likely shut the thread down, so please supply *references* not opinions.

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• Release/Change management - best aproach

  - by Bob Rivers

  I asked this question an year ago in StackOverflow and never got a good answer. Since Programmers seems to be a better place to ask it, I'll give it a try... What is the better way to work with release management? More specifically what would be the best way to release packages? For example, assuming that you have a relatively stable system, a good quality assurance process (QA), etc. How do you prefer to release new versions? Let's assume that we are talking about a mid to large "centralized" web system (no clients), in-house development. This system can be considered "vital" for a corporate operations. I have a tendency to prefer to do this by releasing packets at regular intervals, not greater than 1 to 3 months. During this period, I will include into the package,fixes and improvements and make the implementation in production environment only once. But I've seen some people who prefer to place small changes in production, but with a greater frequency. The claim of these people is that by doing so, it is easier to identify bugs that have gone through the process of QA: in a package with 10 changes and another with only 1, it is much easier to know what caused the problem in the package with just one change... What is the opinion came from you?

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• How do you motivate peers to become better developers?

  - by Brian Rasmussen

  In my experience there seems to be two kinds of developers (if we simplify matters a great deal of course). On the one hand we have the developers, who may do a perfectly acceptable job, but who do not really care about the computer science part of their craft. They usually know few languages / technologies and are happy to let things stay that way. For whatever reason, they don't try to improve their computer science skills unless this is required in their current position. On the other hand, we have the geeks or the pragmatic programmers if you subscribe to that idea. They play around with other languages and technologies and usually have knowledge about several topics outside the technical domain of their current job. I would like to see more developers, who are enthusiastic about software development. If you share this point of view, what do you do to push your peers in that direction? Edit: follow-up question inspired by one of the answers: As non-managers, should we really care about this? And why/why not?

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• Which web site gives the most accurate indication of a programmer's capabilities?

  - by Jerry Coffin

  If you were hiring programmers, and could choose between one of (say) the top 100 coders on topcoder.com, or one of the top 100 on stackoverflow.com, which would you choose? At least to me, it would appear that topcoder.com gives a more objective evaluation of pure ability to solve problems and write code. At the same time, despite obvious technical capabilities, this person may lack any hint of social skills -- he may be purely a "lone coder", with little or no ability to help/work with others, may lack mentoring ability to help transfer his technical skills to others, etc. On the other hand, stackoverflow.com would at least appear to give a much better indication of peers' opinion of the coder in question, and the degree to which his presence and useful and helpful to others on the "team". At the same time, the scoring system is such that somebody who just throws up a lot of mediocre (or even poor answers) will almost inevitably accumulate a positive total of "reputation" points -- a single up-vote (perhaps just out of courtesy) will counteract the effects of no fewer than 5 down-votes, and others are discouraged (to some degree) from down-voting because they have to sacrifice their own reputation points to do so. At the same time, somebody who makes little or no technical contribution seems unlikely to accumulate a reputation that lands them (even close to) the top of the heap, so to speak. So, which provides a more useful indication of the degree to which this particular coder is likely to be useful to your organization? If you could choose between them, which set of coders would you rather have working on your team?

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