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

  - by B Chen

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

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• Would you refactor this and if so, would you charge your client?

  - by Julius

  I am working on a freelance job at home. The client wants me to write some new functionality for his CMS, but it is taking me a lot of time to figure out what the code is doing, because it is written in a very unreadable style. Below is just an example of what I mean. The previous programmer made extensive use of anonymous functions, of eval(), he uses deeply nested ternary operators, he didn't indent code, didn't use comments, and he uses funny constructions like misusing the behaviour of logical operators || and && for creating if/else conditions (the second condition of && only gets tested if the first one is true, opening the possibility to use && as an if/else construction). All in all it's insane code and it's costing me a lot of time to find out how the current code works. return ($this->main->context != "ajax" || in_array($this->type, $this->definition->ajax)) ? eval('return method_exists($this,"Show'.ucfirst($this->type).'") ? $this->Show'.ucfirst($this->type).'('.(count($args) ? join(",",array_map(create_function('$a','return (is_numeric($a) || preg_match("/^array/",$a)) ? $a : "\"".$a."\"";'),$args)) : "").') : null;') : ''; Would you refactor this code and how would you handle this sort of thing with your client, I mean financially?

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• Why isn't DSM for unstructured memory done today?

  - by sinned

  Ages ago, Djikstra invented IPC through mutexes which then somehow led to shared memory (SHM) in multics (which afaik had the necessary mmap first). Then computer networks came up and DSM (distributed SHM) was invented for IPC between computers. So DSM is basically a not prestructured memory region (like a SHM) that magically get's synchronized between computers without the applications programmer taking action. Implementations include Treadmarks (inofficially dead now) and CRL. But then someone thought this is not the right way to do it and invented Linda & tuplespaces. Current implementations include JavaSpaces and GigaSpaces. Here, you have to structure your data into tuples. Other ways to achieve similar effects may be the use of a relational database or a key-value-store like RIAK. Although someone might argue, I don't consider them as DSM since there is no coherent memory region where you can put data structures in as you like but have to structure your data which can be hard if it is continuous and administration like locking can not be done for hard coded parts (=tuples, ...). Why is there no DSM implementation today or am I just unable to find one?

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• Too sell or give for free

  - by QAH

  Hello everyone! I am currently making a game that I was originally planning to sell. It is a simple 2D arcade style game for the PC. I've seen many indie games become popular and generate revenue from advertisements, but the game itself remains free. I need some advice on whether or not I should sell my game, release it for free with advertisements, or ask for donations and keep the game free. I feel that my game is fun, but of course the graphics aren't tip top because I am a programmer, not an artist. I just take screenshots of 3D models I get from Turbosquid and crop around it to make a sprite. Also, and I could be very wrong about this, it seems that there are more legal issues surrounding selling a game than making it free and generating revenue from advertisement, or asking for donations. If I am wrong, someone please correct me. Also, I am very interested in generating some revenue for my work, but that isn't at the very top of my list. I am in my last year of high school, soon to be going to college, and I am going to major in computer science/software engineering. So I am trying to gain some preliminary experience at home by coding stuff every day. One way of getting this experience is by making this game. So what do you think? What route should I take? What has worked well with other indie games? Thanks in advance.

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• Common way of animating 'motion' for walk cycle animations

  - by Ben Hymers

  I've just posted this at the Blender artists' forums before realising I would probably get a better response from a more game development-specific audience, so apologies for cross-posting! It's for the right reasons :) I'm a programmer trying to animate a character walking for a game project, using Ogre. I've made a very simple walk cycle in Blender and exported it to Ogre, and it plays just fine. By fine, I mean it works, but there's terrible foot sliding. This is because I just animated the walk in-place (at the origin) in Blender, and of course I don't know what "speed of walk" that corresponds to, so when I move the character in-game the motion doesn't necessarily match up with the movement of the feet in the animation. So my question is: what's the normal approach for this kind of thing? At work we use Maya, and the animators either animate a special 'moveTrans' node that represents the "position" of the character (or have the exporter generate it for them from the movement of the root node), then the game can read this to know how fast the animation moves the character. So in the Maya file, the character will walk forward for one cycle and this extra node will follow along with them by their feet. I've not seen anything like this in open-source land, and there's certainly no provision for that in the Ogre Exporter script. What do you chaps normally do for this?

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• Adding complexity by generalising: how far should you go?

  - by marcog

  Reference question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4303813/help-with-interview-question The above question asked to solve a problem for an NxN matrix. While there was an easy solution, I gave a more general solution to solve the more general problem for an NxM matrix. A handful of people commented that this generalisation was bad because it made the solution more complex. One such comment is voted +8. Putting aside the hard-to-explain voting effects on SO, there are two types of complexity to be considered here: Runtime complexity, i.e. how fast does the code run Code complexity, i.e. how difficult is the code to read and understand The question of runtime complexity is something that requires a better understanding of the input data today and what it might look like in the future, taking the various growth factors into account where necessary. The question of code complexity is the one I'm interested in here. By generalising the solution, we avoid having to rewrite it in the event that the constraints change. However, at the same time it can often result in complicating the code. In the reference question, the code for NxN is easy to understand for any competent programmer, but the NxM case (unless documented well) could easily confuse someone coming across the code for the first time. So, my question is this: Where should you draw the line between generalising and keeping the code easy to understand?

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• How does a one-man developer do its games' sounds?

  - by Gustavo Maciel

  Before anything, that's not a "oh, where can I find resources?" question. Well, I've been curious about one thing in the indie games industry. For the development of the game, such tasks like game design, art, sketches, code programming and etc can be easily done by just one person. You can just take up a paper and pencil and you're a game designer. You can just take software like Photoshop or Paint and you're an artist, a scanner and you're a sketcher, a compiler and you're a programmer. For sound it's different. You may tell me: Well, follow the line, take a lot of instruments and record it. But all we know that things don't work this way. I can list up some changes for us: External noises are a big problem, sound effects can't be made with instruments, it can't sound like a recorded and clipped sound. Well I can imagine how they do this in large companies, with such big studios and etc. But to summarise, my question is: What's the best way for a one-man indie to do all its sound? Does he have to synthesize everything? Record and buy some crazy program for editing sounds?

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• Is there any site which tells or highlights by zone developer income source? I think i am getting less yearly [closed]

  - by YumYumYum

  http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/ Thats the only one good site i have found, but missing for Belgium and for other European countries. I was searching a site which can tell the income source details for European developer (specially for Belgium). But mostly not a single website exist who tells the true. My situation: As a programmer myself in one company i use all my knowledge, 20++ hours a day (office , home, office, home) because every-time its challenge/complex/stress/over-time feature-requests, at the end of the year in Europe i was getting in total not even the lowest amount shown here (UK pound vs Euro + high-tech most of the time they use + speed in development): http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/ In one company i have to use my best performance knowledge for whole year with: C, Java, PHP (Zend Framework, Cakephp), BASH, MySQL/DB2, Linux/Unix, Javascript, Dojo, JQuery, Css, Html, Xml. Company wants to pay lesser but always it has to be perfect and it has to be solid gold and diamond like quality. And the total amount in Europe is not sufficient for me if i compare with other countries and living cost in Europe including taxes. Is there any developers/community site where we can see by country, zone what is minimum to maximum income source getting offered to the developers? So that some developers who is in troubles, they can shout and speak up louder with those references?

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• Efficient mapping layout in 2D side-scroller, and collisions between character and the world

  - by Jack

  I haven't touched Visual Studio for a couple months now, but I was playing a game from the '90s toady and had an epiphany: I was looking for something what i didn't need, and I wasn't using what I knew correctly. One of those realizations was collision, so let me tell you a bit about my project that I was working on. The project's graphics looks like Mario or Dangerous Dave, etc., you get the idea - old-school pixels. So anyway I remember trying to think of something else than AABB for character form, but I couldn't think of anything. Perhaps I could get a suggestion for this? Another thing is the world - I don't want it to be just linear world, I want mountains, etc.. My idea is to use triangles, and no idea yet what to do if I want just part of the cube, say 3/4 or 2/4 or whatever. Hard-coding such things seems inefficient. P.S. I am not looking at the precision level offered by Box2D. Actually I remember trying to implement it at first, but I failed as my understanding of C++ wasn't advanced enough, as it'll be mentioned below. P.P.S. I am programming in C++, and I haven't done it for a couple months now. I have no means of testing it either, as my PC is broken down, and this one can barely run games from late '90s, not to speak about a compiler or a program with inefficient resource management... I am also not an expert (obviously), I don't even know if I can consider myself an average programmer. In short, I am simply curious about my thoughts and my past experience when programming the game. I may come back to it when my PC is fixed, I'm already filling a note about these things.

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• How to go from mainstream to indie development?

  - by Salano Software

  I'm currently working as a game programmer for a AAA-level developer and publisher - which falls into the 'nice problem to have' category, I know, except that I'm growing more and more disenchanted with the direction of both the company and the AAA portion of the industry as a whole. I don't see any games on the studio's calendar for the next several years that I'm actually interested in working on; it looks like a continuing parade of sequels, license extensions and largely-derivative work. Which isn't to say that there won't be interesting things to do on those projects; but more and more I find myself wanting to do something fundamentally different. It seems like the market's never been better for smaller-scale projects, and I'd love to jump into that (and I've done small demos for Android and have started digging into iOS), but I obviously can't put anything out while I'm working for the company, and I'm concerned that I shouldn't even do substantial development in my spare time on anything I'd eventually like to release on my own. At the same time, I'm leery of leaving the job I've got for hopefully-obvious reasons, especially without a specific plan in place. Has anyone out there got experience with 'going indie' out of a mainstream job, and does anyone have specific suggestions as to what the best approach is and what I should specifically be thinking about or be careful of?

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

  - by Medo42

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

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• What do I need to develop a PHP extension in lampp?

  - by Fernando Costa

  Actually I'm dealing with a trouble in my system, I have to delivery the system to clients and it was built in PHP, JS, ShellScript and SQL. I would like to encrypt the code or obfuscate it from eyes of others! Then someone from the community told me about build my own PHP extension, it sounds to me as a great idea, since it will not be with the main code of the system. But I have a problem doing this way, if a programmer get in the extensions and find it, all the hard work has gone. Then I'm here to ask again about this matter. What is the best way to hide my Business Logic from third parties? I know that has stuffs like IonCube, Zend Guard, and many others. But I'm looking something that I can build myself. Is PHP extension the right way to follow? Or some Half SaaS system, with dependencies (Business Logic) in a remote server? About the environment OS: Kernel Linux 2.6.37.1-1.2 - LAMPP (Apache 2.2, MySQL 5.5 PHP 5.3.8) In php generally the extension is located at /php/ext/ but in lampp I have no idea where it is, I just found a folder /opt/lampp/lib/php/extensions/ is that right place?

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• How to advertise (free) software?

  - by nebukadnezzar

  I'm not sure if this fits on SO, but other SE sites don't seem to fit either, so I understand when this question gets moved, Although I'd like to avoid getting it closed due to being offtopics, since I think that this question might fit, considering this part of the FAQ: Stack Overflow is for professional and enthusiast programmers, ... covers … a specific programming problem ... matters that are unique to the programming profession Sorry for the lengthy Introduction, though. When Software is advertised, it is usually Software for one (or more) specific purpose, such as: Mozilla Firefox - A Web Browser Ubuntu - An Operating System Python - A Programming Language Visual Studio - A Development Studio ... And so on. But when writing Libraries, that is, Software that doesn't necessarily serve one specific purpose, but instead multiple purposes, which are usually supposed to be used inside an application, such as: Irrlicht - A 3D Engine Qt - An Application Framework ... The process of advertisement gets a little more difficult. I'm a developer of the latter kind of Software, and I naturally want to advertise my Software. It's not commercial Software; It's not GPL either. It's completely free (Licensed under the MIT License :-)). I naturally host my stuff at github, which technically makes it very easy to access the software, and I thought that these might be possible options, although I have no experience with them: Submit the Software to Freshmeat, and hope for the best Submit the Software to Sourceforge, and hope someone accidently stumbles over it Write spammails, and get death threats via Mail ... But something tells me that these methods are probably not the best Methods. So, my final question would be, How does the Average Joe Hobby Programmer advertise his/her Software Library?

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• 2D animations frames vs 3D animation for small indie project: timing considerations

  - by mm24

  pretty lame question but was wondering.. I am developing a 2D game using Cocos2D for iOS. The art work till now is all 2D (is a shooter game) but some of the characters would benefit of complex animations (eg. 20 frames). I feel a bit stupid because I came across only now that there is the chance to do 3D to 2D frames exporting and then to use them in Cocos2D. The thing that put me off on 3D gaming at first was that it takes more than one person in a team to do so properly (Illustrator, 3D modeller, 3D animator and programmer). Now I feel a bit stupid because having a 3D model I could do and modify the poses whenever I wanted (I should ask to the 3D animator which I guess would be time expensive). Instead now is me and two illustrators (as I require many frames per character). Is my impression that it would have been much longer right or not? Are there any other project management considerations that can be done on this? Sorry if for some this might be trivial but is my first "indie game developer experience".

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• How to show or direct a business analyst to do data modelling?

  - by AaronLS

  Our business analysts pushed hard to collect data through a spreadsheet. I am the programmer responsible for importing that data. Usually when they push hard for something like this, I never know how well it will work out until a few weeks later when I have time assigned to work on the task of programming the import of the data. I have tried to do as much as possible along the way, named ranges, data validations, etc. But I usually don't have time to take a detailed look at all the data and compare to the destination in the database to determine how well it matches up. A lot of times there will be maybe a little table of items that somehow I have to relate to something else in the database, but there are not natural or business keys present that would allow me to do so. Make the best of this, trying to write something that can compare strings and make a best guess at it and then go through the effort of creating interfaces for a user to match the imported data to the destination. I feel like if the business analyst was actually creating a data model, they would be forced to think about these relationships, and have an appreciation for the need of natural or business keys to be part of the spreadsheet for the purposes of smoothly importing the data. The closest they come to business analysis is a big flat list of fields, and that would be fine if it were like any other data dictionary and include data types+relationships, but it isn't. They are just a bunch of names. No indication of what type of data they might hold, and it is up to me to guess. When I have pushed for more detail, they say that it is just busy work. How can I explain the importance of data modelling? How can I tell them what it is and how to do it? It feels impossible, because they don't have an appreciation for its importance. They do however, usually have an interest in helping out in whatever way they can, it's just this in particular has never gotten a motivated response.

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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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• Novice prototyping a massive multiplayer webpage based gaming system

  - by Sean Hendlin

  I'm trying to build a website based game in which various pages of the site act as different areas of the game. I am wondering what you would recommended as a design structure. Which languages would be best if building what will hopefully becomes a massive system able to scale to massive amounts of users. I am wondering if and how various elements from differing languages could be meshed to interact with each other. For example could I use html5, javascript, and PHP? What about asp.net how might that factor in? I'm a newbie programmer but I've been working on this idea for years and I want to build it to reality. Your comments and suggestions are appreciated. P.S.: The game is not all graphics and animation (though flash like appearance and some animation would be nice). What I am thinking of is essentially a heavily gamified system of forms. And LOTS of data in many different categories cross referencing each-other. I'm not sure how to go about structuring the collection of data. Also while I know javascript can be used to process some functions, I'm wondering what sort of base system I would need to handle the server side processing of what I am expecting to be some pretty significant algorithm processing. That is to say I expect to have many many many functions and I'm not sure how to mange this using javascript. I feel like they would be forgotten, mixed up, disorganizes as they essentially only exist where they are coded. I guess I need to learn something of libraries? OK, Thank you! Is enough from me for now.

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• C++ Numerical Recipes &ndash; A New Adventure!

  - by JoshReuben

  I am about to embark on a great journey – over the next 6 weeks I plan to read through C++ Numerical Recipes 3rd edition http://amzn.to/YtdpkS I'll be reading this with an eye to C++ AMP, thinking about implementing the suitable subset (non-recursive, additive, commutative) to run on the GPU. APIs supporting HPC, GPGPU or MapReduce are all useful – providing you have the ability to choose the correct algorithm to leverage on them. I really think this is the most fascinating area of programming – a lot more exciting than LOB CRUD !!! When you think about it , everything is a function – we categorize & we extrapolate. As abstractions get higher & less leaky, sooner or later information systems programming will become a non-programmer task – you will be using WYSIWYG designers to build: GUIs MVVM service mapping & virtualization workflows ORM Entity relations In the data source SharePoint / LightSwitch are not there yet, but every iteration gets closer. For information workers, managed code is a race to the bottom. As MS futures are a bit shaky right now, the provider agnostic nature & higher barriers of entry of both C++ & Numerical Analysis seem like a rational choice to me. Its also fascinating – stepping outside the box. This is not the first time I've delved into numerical analysis. 6 months ago I read Numerical methods with Applications, which can be found for free online: http://nm.mathforcollege.com/ 2 years ago I learned the .NET Extreme Optimization library www.extremeoptimization.com – not bad 2.5 years ago I read Schaums Numerical Analysis book http://amzn.to/V5yuLI - not an easy read, as topics jump back & forth across chapters: 3 years ago I read Practical Numerical Methods with C# http://amzn.to/V5yCL9 (which is a toy learning language for this kind of stuff) I also read through AI a Modern Approach 3rd edition END to END http://amzn.to/V5yQSp - this took me a few years but was the most rewarding experience. I'll post progress updates – see you on the other side !

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• Would it be a good idea to work on letting people add arrays of numbers in javascript?

  - by OneThreeSeven

  I am a very mathematically oriented programmer, and I happen to be doing a lot of java script these days. I am really disappointed in the math aspects of javascript: the Math object is almost a joke because it has so few methods you can't use ^ for exponentiation the + operator is very limited, you cant add array's of numbers or do scalar multiplication on arrays Now I have written some pretty basic extensions to the Math object and have considered writing a library of advanced Math features, amazingly there doesn't seem to be any sort of standard library already out even for calculus, although there is one for vectors and matricies I was able find. The notation for working with vectors and matricies is really bad when you can't use the + operator on arrays, and you cant do scalar multiplication. For example, here is a hideous expression for subtracting two vectors, A - B: Math.vectorAddition(A,Math.scalarMultiplication(-1,B)); I have been looking for some kind of open-source project to contribute to for awhile, and even though my C++ is a bit rusty I would very much like to get into the code for V8 engine and extend the + operator to work on arrays, to get scalar multiplication to work, and possibly to get the ^ operator to work for exponentiation. These things would greatly enhance the utility of any mathematical javascript framework. I really don't know how to get involved in something like the V8 engine other than download the code and start working on it. Of course I'm afraid that since V8 is chrome specific, that without browser cross-compatibility a fundamental change of this type is likely to be rejected for V8. I was hoping someone could either tell me why this is a bad idea, or else give me some pointers about how to proceed at this point to get some kind of approval to add these features. Thanks!

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• Software management for 2 programmers

  - by kajo

  me and my very good friend do a small bussiness. We have company and we develop web apps using Scala. We have started 3 months ago and we have a lot of work now. We cannot afford to employ another programmer because we can't pay him now. Until now we try to manage entire developing process very simply. We use excel sheets for simple bug tracking and we work on client requests on the fly. We have no plan for next week or something similar. But now I find it very inefficient and useless. I am trying to find some rules or some methodology for small team or for only two guys. For example Scrum is, imo, unadapted for us. There are a lot of roles (ScrumMaster, Product Owner, Team...) and it seems overkill. Can you something advise me? Have you any experiences with software management in small teams? Is any methodology of current agile development fitten for pair of programmers? Is there any software management for simple bug tracking, maybe wiki or time management for two coders? thanks a lot for sharing.

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• Is there a process-oriented IDE ?

  - by Raveline

  My problem is simple : when I'm programming in an OO paradigm, I'm often having part of a main business process divided in many classes. Which means, if I want to examine the whole functional chain that leads to the output, for debugging or for optimization research, it can be a bit painful. So I was wondering : is there an IDE that let you put a "process tag" on functions coming from different objects, and give you a view of all those functions having the same tag ? edit : To give an example (that I'm making up completely, sorry if it doesn't sound very realistic). Let's say we have the following business process for a HR application : receive a holiday-request by an employee, check the validity of the request, then give an alert to his boss ("one of those lazy programmer wants another day off"); at the same time, let's say the boss will want to have a table of all employee's timetable during the time the employee wants his vacations; then handle the answer of the boss, send a nice little mail to the employee ("No way, lazy bones"). Even if we get rid of everything not purely business-related (mail sending process, db handling to get the useful info, GUI functionalities, and so on), we still have something that doesn't really fit in "one class". I'd like to have an IDE that would give me the opportunity to embrace quickly, at the very least : The function handling the validation of the request by the employee; The function preparing the "timetable" for the boss; The function handling the validation of the request by the boss; I wouldn't put all those functions in the same class (but perhaps that's my mistake ?). This is where my dreamed IDE could be helpful.

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• How does one rein in the complexities of web development ?

  - by Rahul

  I have been a server-side programmer for most of my career and have only recently started spending more time on web development. I am amazed at the number of things I need to master in order to write a decent web application. Just to list down a few tools/technologies I need to learn, Server side programming language (Java/JSP, ASP, PHP, Ruby or something else) A decent web framework (for any medium to big size application). HTML & CSS Javascript Javascript library (JQuery/ExtJS etc. primarily for AJAX). Good to know even if not necessary. At least a basic knowledge of web design - layouts, colors, fonts etc. A good understanding of web security. A good understanding of Performance/scalability issues. Testing, browser compatibility issues etc. The list goes on. So, my question to seasoned web developers is - How do you guys manage to learn and keep yourself updated on so many things? While developing a web application, how do you handle the complexities involved in these areas and yet manage to write an application that is well designed, user friendly, secure, performant and scalable. As a web developer, does one have to be a jack of all trades or should one specialize in one or two areas and leave the rest to other members of the team ?

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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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• Split a 2D scene in layers or have a z coordinate

  - by Bane

  I am in the process of writing a 2D game engine, and a dilemma emerged. Let me explain the situation... I have a Scene class, to which various objects can be added (Drawable, ParticleEmitter, Light2D, etc), and as this is a 2D scene, things will obviously be drawn over each other. My first thought was that I could have basic add and remove methods, but I soon realized that then there would be no way for the programmer to control the order in which things were drawn. So I can up with two options, each with its pros and cons. A) Would be to split the scene in layers. By that I mean instead of having the scene be a container of objects, have it be a container of layers, which are in turn the containers of objects. B) Would require to have some kind of z-coordinate, and then have the scene sorted so objects with lower z get drawn first. Option A is pretty solid, but the problem is with the lights. In what layer do I add it? Does it work cross-layer? On all bottom layers? And I still need the Z coordinate to calculate the shadow! Option B would require me to change all my code from having Vector2D positions, to some kind of class that inherits from Vector2D and adds a z coordinate to it (I don't want it to be a Vector3D because I still need all the same methods the 2D kind has, just with .z clamped on). Am I missing something? Is there an alternative to these methods? I'm working in Javascript, if that makes a difference.

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• Perfomance of 8 bit operations on 64 bit architechture

  - by wobbily_col

  I am usually a Python / Database programmer, and I am considering using C for a problem. I have a set of sequences, 8 characters long with 4 possible characters. My problem involves combining sets of these sequences and filtering which sets match a criteria. The combinations of 5 run into billions of rows and takes around an hour to run. So I can represent each sequence as 2 bytes. If I am working on a 64 bit architechture will I gain any advantage by keeping these data structures as 2 bytes when I generate the combinations, or will I be as well storing them as 8 bytes / double ? (64 bit = 8 x 8) If I am on a 64 bit architecture, all registers will be 64 bit, so in terms of operations that shouldn´t be any faster (please correct me if I am wrong). Will I gain anything from the smaller storage requirements - can I fit more combinations in memory, or will they all take up 64 bits anyway? And finally, am I likley to gain anything coding in C. I have a first version, which stores the sequence as a small int in a MySQL database. It then self joins the tabe to itself a number of times in order to generate all the possible combinations. The performance is acceptable, depending on how many combinations are generated. I assume the database must involve some overhead.

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