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• Is there a Windows philosophy of programming?

  - by Maglob

  I've been programming both in Unix and Windows environments. Mostly I've worked in Unix, where I've learned Unix Philosophy, which can be summarized as Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface. There seems to be a clear difference in programming cultures between Unix and Windows worlds, for example: GUI vs CLI Registry vs config files Lots of tools specializing for any given need vs group of generic orthogonal tools which can combined Is there equivalent of "Unix philosophy" in Windows world? What Unix-programmer can learn from Windows or should be aware of when moving to programming in Windows? I would like answers to focus on the best practices of Windows programming (and not a fight between Windows and Unix).

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• MIT vs Berkley philosophy

  - by Flinkman

  Hi How would you describe MIT vs Berkley philosophy to one that do not know what it is?

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• Books about the philosophy of software development

  - by anon

  The first time I read The Mythical Man Month, I found the book utterly boring, a waste of my time, and thought it was written by some management guru that never wrote a line of code. A few years later, I realized Fred Brooks won the Turing award. Some years after that, after a few large development projects, I started understanding what he was talking about. Are there any other books about software development on a meta/philosophical level—not in the sense of design patterns, templates, or even lisp macros—but at a level where ideas are expressed without code?

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• Java language philosophy question

  - by BlessedKey

  Why was java defined such that methods may take as input multiple parameters, but may only return a single object (or void)? Did it make the language somehow easier to implement or use?

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• Design Philosophy Question - When to create new functions

  - by Eclyps19

  This is a general design question not relating to any language. I'm a bit torn between going for minimum code or optimum organization. I'll use my current project as an example. I have a bunch of tabs on a form that perform different functions. Lets say Tab 1 reads in a file with a specific layout, tab 2 exports a file to a specific location, etc. The problem I'm running into now is that I need these tabs to do something slightly different based on the contents of a variable. If it contains a 1 I may need to use Layout A and perform some extra concatenation, if it contains a 2 I may need to use Layout B and do no concatenation but add two integer fields, etc. There could be 10+ codes that I will be looking at. Is it more preferable to create an individual path for each code early on, or attempt to create a single path that branches out only when absolutely required. Creating an individual path for each code would allow my code to be extremely easy to follow at a glance, which in turn will help me out later on down the road when debugging or making changes. The downside to this is that I will increase the amount of code written by calling some of the same functions in multiple places (for example, steps 3, 5, and 9 for every single code may be exactly the same. Creating a single path that would branch out only when required will be a bit messier and more difficult to follow at a glance, but I would create less code by placing conditionals only at steps that are unique. I realize that this may be a case-by-case decision, but in general, if you were handed a previously built program to work on, which would you prefer?

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• Philosophy of scroll bars [closed]

  - by Parkhid

  Please suppose I want to design my own text editor . simply like notepad. Without using any richtextbox or other controls LIKE EDIT in C++. Main Handle is just a window in C++ or usercontrol in C#. The Question is here for scrolling option , how can I perform scrolling when user is typing. I mean vertical scrolling here . What is Philosophy of works of scroll bars in C++ windows or C# user controls ? Should I Clear the (Usercontrol or Window) When User reaches to end of (Usercontrol or Window) and then Put caret on start of (Usercontrol or Window) ? What about scrolling with thumb or hand scrolling ? How can I find the Text Position which scroll to ?

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• Philosophy behind the memento pattern

  - by TheSilverBullet

  I have been reading up on memento pattern from various sources of the internet. Differing information from different sources has left me in confusion regarding why this pattern is actually needed. The dofactory implementation says that the primary intention of this pattern is to restore the state of the system. Wiki says that the primary intention is to be able to restore the changes on the system. This gives a different impact - saying that it is possible for a system to have memento implementation with no need to restore. And that ability of restore is a feature of this. OODesign says that It is sometimes necessary to capture the internal state of an object at some point and have the ability to restore the object to that state later in time. Such a case is useful in case of error or failure. So, my question is why exactly do we use this one? Is it to save previous states - or to promote encapsulation between the Caretaker and the Memento? Why is this type of encapsulation so important? Edit: For those visiting, check out this Implementation!

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• Ubuntu Philosophy Question

  - by The-Ever-Kid

  I was just switching from Windows to Ubuntu and I started to read this. And there were quite a few things I did not understand one was : "OpenOffice decided not to have a learning curve" And "Firefox tries very hard to make sure pages written in 1995 look like they did in 1995. " And Finally "Windows isn't a poor man's Linux." In the final statement shouldn't the statement be the opposite.

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• Is the Unix Philosophy still relevant in the Web 2.0 world?

  - by David Titarenco

  Introduction Hello, let me give you some background before I begin. I started programming when I was 5 or 6 on my dad's PSION II (some primitive BASIC-like language), then I learned more and more, eventually inching my way up to C, C++, Java, PHP, JS, etc. I think I'm a pretty decent coder. I think most people would agree. I'm not a complete social recluse, but I do stuff like write a virtual machine for fun. I've never taken a computer course in college because I've been in and out for the past couple of years and have only been taking core classes; never having been particularly amazing at school, perhaps I'm missing some basic tenet that most learn in CS101. I'm currently reading Coders at Work and this question is based on some ideas I read in there. A Brief (Fictionalized) Example So a certain sunny day I get an idea. I hire a designer and hammer away at some C/C++ code for a couple of months, soon thereafter releasing silvr.com, a website that transmutes lead into silver. Yep, I started my very own start-up and even gave it a clever web 2.0 name with a vowel missing. Mom and dad are proud. I come up with some numbers I should be seeing after 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 12 months and set sail. Obviously, my transmuting server isn't perfect, sometimes it segfaults, sometimes it leaks memory. I fix it and keep truckin'. After all, gdb is my best friend. Eventually, I'm at a position where a very small community of people are happily transmuting lead into silver on a semi-regular basis, but they want to let their friends on MySpace know how many grams of lead they transmuted today. And they want to post images of their lead and silver nuggets on flickr. I'm losing out on potential traffic unless I let them log in with their Yahoo, Google, and Facebook accounts. They want webcam support and live cock fighting, merry-go-rounds and Jabberwockies. All these things seem necessary. The Aftermath Of course, I have to re-write the transmuting server! After all, I've been losing money all these months. I need OAuth libraries and OpenID libraries, JSON support, and the only stable Jabberwocky API is for Java. C++ isn't even an option anymore. I'm just one guy! The Java binary just grows and grows since I need some legacy Apache include for the JSON library, and some antiquated Sun dependency for OAuth support. Then I pick up a book like Coders at Work and read what people like jwz say about complexity... I think to myself.. Keep it simple, stupid. I like simple things. I've always loved the Unix Philosophy but even after trying to keep the new server source modular and sleek, I loathe having to write one more line of code. It feels that I'm just piling crap on top of other crap. Maybe I'm naive thinking every piece of software can be simple and clever. Maybe it's just a phase.. or is the Unix Philosophy basically dead when it comes to the current state of (web) development? I'm just kind of disheartened :(

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• Maven plugin development [closed]

  - by Eugen Martynov

  Pre: I'm new with Maven. I used a lot of ant before. Qst: I decided to switch my project to maven since there are a lot of dependencies. But I have custom step in package phase (I'm BB dev - packing and signing) which is not available in maven yet. To process these tasks I have to download additional execs/jars. Is it common/have sense in Maven philosophy to load additional tools? Sure I could call ant from maven but it's not a question. Any helpful book about maven phases, philosophy and uses?

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• What is ExtJS philosophy? Single page application?

  - by stach

  I need to write my next project using ExtJs. It's a nice Javascript lib but I don't fully understand the idea behind it. Take the docs page for example: http://www.extjs.com/deploy/dev/docs/ Am I supposed to write my web applications with extjs like that? One page that should never be refreshed, and everything getting done by AJAX? How do you debug such applications if getting to the right place may take a lot of 'clicking' and working with it. You cannot fix the bug and hit refresh in the browser to see the results. Any suggestions?

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• Windows Phone 7 Series - what the new mobile platform hides in itself

  - by sergey.zwezdin

  By this post I wish to open a series of articles about development for Windows Phone 7 Series. We will start that we will consider philosophy of a new platform from the point of view of the developer. Read more...(read more)

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• What discipline does Computer Science belong to?

  - by Macneil

  Is Computer Science science, applied mathematics, engineering, art, philosophy? "Other"? To provide background, here is Steven Wartik's blog posting for Scientific American titled "I'm not a real scientist, and that's okay." The article covers some good topics for this question, but it leaves open more than it answers. If you can think of the discipline, how would computer science fit into its definition? Should the discipline for Computer Science be based on what programmers do, or what academics do? What kind of answers do you get from people who've seemed to think deeply about this? What reasons do they give?

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• Concrete examples of Python's "only one way to do it" maxim

  - by Charles Roper

  I am learning Python and am intrigued by the following point in PEP 20 The Zen of Python: There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch. Could anyone offer any concrete examples of this maxim? I am particularly interested in the contrast to other languages such as Ruby. Part of the Ruby design philosophy (originating with Perl, I think?) is that multiple ways of doing it is A Good Thing. Can anyone offer some examples showing the pros and cons of each approach. Note, I'm not after an answer to which is better (which is probably too subjective to ever be answered), but rather an unbiased comparison of the two styles.

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• How to avoid being forked into oblivion by a more powerful contributor?

  - by Den

  As recently reported here: Xamarin has forked Cocos2D-XNA, a 2D/3D game development framework, creating a cross-platform library that can be included in PCL projects. However the founder of the project that was forked says: The purpose of the MIT license is to unencumber your fair use. Not to encourage you to take software, rebrand it as your own, and then "take it in a new direction" as you say. While not illegal, it is unethical. It seems that the GitHub page of the new project doesn't even indicate that it's a fork in a typical GitHub manner, opting for an easily-removable History section instead (see bottom). So my questions are: Was Xamarin's action and the way the action was done ethical or not? Is it possible to avoid such a situation if you are a single developer or a small unfunded group of developers? I am hoping this could be either a wiki question or there will be some objective answers grounded on modern OSS ethics/philosophy.

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• What do you wish language designers paid attention to?

  - by Berin Loritsch

  The purpose of this question is not to assemble a laundry list of programming language features that you can't live without, or wish was in your main language of choice. The purpose of this question is to bring to light corners of languge design most language designers might not think about. So, instead of thinking about language feature X, think a little more philisophically. One of my biases, and perhaps it might be controversial, is that the softer side of engineering--the whys and what fors--are many times more important than the more concrete side. For example, Ruby was designed with a stated goal of improving developer happiness. While your opinions may be mixed on whether it delivered or not, the fact that was a goal means that some of the choices in language design were influenced by that philosophy. Please do not post: Syntax flame wars (I could care less whether you use whitespace [Python], keywords [Ruby], or curly braces [Java, C/C++, et. al.] to denote program blocks). That's just an implementation detail. "Any language that doesn't have feature X doesn't deserve to exist" type comments. There is at least one reason for all programming languages to exist--good or bad. Please do post: Philisophical ideas that language designers seem to miss. Technical concepts that seem to be poorly implemented more often than not. Please do provide an example of the pain it causes and if you have any ideas of how you would prefer it to function. Things you wish were in the platform's common library but seldom are. One the same token, things that usually are in a common library that you wish were not. Conceptual features such as built in test/assertion/contract/error handling support that you wish all programming languages would implement properly--and define properly. My hope is that this will be a fun and stimulating topic.

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• Philosophy of [WebInvoke(ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)]

  - by Mikey Cee

  Hi everyone, I'm writing what I'm referring to as a POJ (Plain Old JSON) WCF web service - one that takes and emits standard JSON with none of the crap that ASP.NET Ajax likes to add to it. It seems that there are three steps to accomplish this: Change to in the endpoint's tag Decorate the method with [WebInvoke(ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)] Add an incantation of [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] to the service contract This is all working OK for me - I can pass in and am being returned nice plain JSON. If I remove the WebInvoke attribute, then I get XML returned instead, so it is certainly doing what it is supposed to do. But it strikes me as odd that the option to specify JSON output appears here and not in the configuration file. Say I wanted to expose my method as an XML endpoint too - how would I do this? Currently the only way I can see would be to have a second method that does exactly the same thing but does not have WebMethodFormat.Json specified. Then rinse and repeat for every method in my service? Yuck. Specifying that the output should be serialized to JSON in the attribute seems to be completely contrary to the philosophy of WCF, where the service is implemented is a transport and encoding agnostic manner, leaving the nasty details of how the data will be moved around to the configuration file. Is there a better way of doing what I want to do? Or are we stuck with this awkward attribute? Or do I not understanding WCF deeply enough?

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• Building a common syntax and scoping framework.

  - by Ben DeMott

  Hello fellow programmers, I was discussing a project the other day with a colleague of mine and I was curious to see what others had to say or if such a thing already existed. Background There are many programming languages. There are many IDE's and source editors that highlight and edit source code. Following perfectly and exactly the rules of a language to present auto-complete options and understand scopes in the code is rather complex. This task is complex enough that most IDE's implement different source-editors as plugins that often re-implement the same features over and over but in a different way (netbeans). From what I can tell most IDE's and source editors re-implement parsers that use regular expressions, or some meta-syntax Naur Form to describe the languages grammer generically. These parsers are implemented over and over and over again. Question Has anyone attempted to unify or describe a set of features through an API and have a consistent interface to parsing various programming languages and dialects. I'm not describing an IDE - but a consistent API for any program to use to parse and obtain meta-information from the source code. I realize various programming languages offer many different features which are difficult to 'abstract' into a set of features, but I feel this would be a worthwhile venture. It seems to me that this could possibly allow the authors of interpreters to help maintain a central grammer intepreter for their language. the Python foundation could maintain the Python grammer api, ANSI the C grammer api, Oracle the Java grammer API, etc Example usage If this was API existed code documentation generators could theoretically work across all dialects and languages to some level. It wouldn't matter if your project used 5 different languages a single application could document all of them and the comments and doc-tags within. Has anyone attempted this comprehensively?

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• Does Open Source lead to bad coding?

  - by David Conde

  I have a thought that I tried asking at SO, but didnt seem like the appropriate place. I think that source sites like Google Code, GitHub, SourceForge... have played a major role in the history of programming. However, I found that there is another bad thing to these kind of sites and that is you may just "copy" code from almost anyone, not knowing if it is good(tested) source or not. This line of thought has taken me to believe that source code websites tend to lead many developers (most likely unexperienced) to copy/paste massive amounts of code, which I find just wrong. I really dont know how to focus the question well, but basic thought would be: Is this ok? Is Open Source contributing to that or I'm just seeing ghosts... Hope people get interested because I think this is an important theme.

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• Why can't we capture the design of software more effectively?

  - by Ira Baxter

  As engineers, we all "design" artifacts (buildings, programs, circuits, molecules...). That's an activity (design-the-verb) that produces some kind of result (design-the-noun). I think we all agree that design-the-noun is a different entity than the artifact itself. A key activity in the software business (indeed, in any business where the resulting product artifact needs to be enhanced) is to understand the "design (the-noun)". Yet we seem, as a community, to be pretty much complete failures at recording it, as evidenced by the amount of effort people put into rediscovering facts about their code base. Ask somebody to show you the design of their code and see what you get. I think of a design for software as having: An explicit specification for what the software is supposed to do and how well it does it An explicit version of the code (this part is easy, everybody has it) An explanation for how each part of the code serves to achieve the specification A rationale as to why the code is the way it is (e.g., why a particualr choice rather than another) What is NOT a design is a particular perspective on the code. For example [not to pick specifically on] UML diagrams are not designs. Rather, they are properties you can derive from the code, or arguably, properties you wish you could derive from the code. But as a general rule, you can't derive the code from UML. Why is it that after 50+ years of building software, why don't we have regular ways to express this? My personal opinion is that we don't have good ways to express this. Even if we do, most of the community seems so focused on getting "code" that design-the-noun gets lost anyway. (IMHO, until design becomes the purpose of engineering, with the artifact extracted from the design, we're not going to get around this). What have you seen as means for recording designs (in the sense I have described it)? Explicit references to papers would be good. Why do you think specific and general means have not been succesful? How can we change this?

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• Solid principles vs YAGNI

  - by KeesDijk

  When do the SOLID principles become YAGNI? As programmers we make trade-offs all the time, between complexity, maintainability, time to build and so forth. Amongst others, two of the smartest guidelines for making choices are in my mind the SOLID principles and YAGNI. If you don't need it; don't build it, and keep it clean. Now for example, when I watch the dimecast series on SOLID, I see it starts out as a fairly simple program, and ends up as a pretty complex one (end yes complexity is also in the eye of the beholder), but it still makes me wonder: when do SOLID principles turn into something you don't need? All solid principles are ways of working that enable use to make changes at a later stage. But what if the problem to solve is a pretty simple one and it's a throwaway application, then what? Or are the SOLID principles something that always apply? As asked in the comments: Solid Principles YAGNI

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• Effective versus efficient code

  - by Todd Williamson

  TL;DR: Quick and dirty code, or "correct" (insert your definition of this term) code? There is often a tension between "efficient" and "effective" in software development. "Efficient" often means code that is "correct" from the point of view of adhering to standards, using widely-accepted patterns/approaches for structures, regardless of project size, budget, etc. "Effective" is not about being "right", but about getting things done. This often results in code that falls outside the bounds of commonly accepted "correct" standards, usage, etc. Usually the people paying for the development effort have dictated ahead of time what it is that they value more. An organization that lives in a technical space will tend towards the efficient end, others will tend towards the effective. Developers often refuse to compromise their favored approach for the other. In my own experience I have found that people with formal education in software development tend towards the Efficient camp. Those that picked up software development more or less as a tool to get things done tend towards the Effective camp. These camps don't get along very well. When managing a team of developers who are not all in one camp it is challenging. In your own experience, which camp do you land in, and do you find yourself having to justify your approach to others? To management? To other developers?

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• How to handle interruptions in developer work without losing concentration? [closed]

  - by tomaszs

  I work as a developer for some years now. Mainly the issue why it's antisocial work is because you need to spend much time programming. I've been always the kind of developer who likes to cut off from any sources of distraction and spend several hours on project because in this way i (as i hope) do it faster. There are also other kinds of developers, more social that can chat, read, watch movies while development and they are ok with this and don't hesitate to be interrupted in their work in any time and come back to the project without any problem. For me any distraction is source of frustration because i need to spend substantial time to load my mind with all info about the project and to concentrate back on the tasks. I always thought it's better to do this that way because project is completed faster. But it makes some things difficult: it's hard to chat with someone who needs to have some important info: because you are a bit frustrated when you know you loose your Zen. And sometimes its more important to chat with someone than to loose Zen. Well.. mostly in any other kind of work the ability to be "multitask" is very important. But as a developer and as a person it's also very important to stay social. And i see now that the problem of concentration makes it difficult to make the right chose: the cost of maintaining concentration is just sometimes so damn high! So is it only me that i have so little concentration skills so any interruption is for me a big deal? Maybe it's just i have so bad memory so that i dont remember all issues of a project so long? Or maybe i develop the project in a fashion that requires me to store so much info on my mind only to be able to start working with code? Or should i just accept that being more social will make me finish project slower and in the fashion that i personally consider non 100% productive? And it's just normal thing and i should just accept it and start to live like any other person who has many works and don't assume that programming is in any case other than any other work and i just do fuzz about the whole concentration thing? This is question for mid-pro developers. I think you was having the same dillema in your life. I would be glad if you could help me take the right road here because it's just driving me and i suppose people i work with crazy for years.

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• What is the rationale behind Apache Jena's *everything is an interface if possible* design philosophy?

  - by David Cowden

  If you are familiar with the Java RDF and OWL engine Jena, then you have run across their philosophy that everything should be specified as an interface when possible. This means that a Resource, Statement, RDFNode, Property, and even the RDF Model, etc., are, contrary to what you might first think, Interfaces instead of concrete classes. This leads to the use of Factories quite often. Since you can't instantiate a Property or Model, you must have something else do it for you --the Factory design pattern. My question, then, is, what is the reasoning behind using this pattern as opposed to a traditional class hierarchy system? It is often perfectly viable to use either one. For example, if I want a memory backed Model instead of a database-backed Model I could just instantiate those classes, I don't need ask a Factory to give me one. As an aside, I'm in the process of writing a library for manipulating Pearltrees data, which is exported from their website in the form of an RDF/XML document. As I write this library, I have many options for defining the relationships present in the Peartrees data. What is nice about the Pearltrees data is that it has a very logical class system: A tree is made up of pearls, which can be either Page, Reference, Alias, or Root pearls. My question comes from trying to figure out if I should adopt the Jena philosophy in my library which uses Jena, or if I should disregard it, pick my own design philosophy, and stick with it.

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• Need advice on OOP philosophy

  - by David Jenings

  I'm trying to get the wheels turning on a large project in C#. My previous experience is in Delphi, where by default every form was created at applicaton startup and form references where held in (gasp) global variables. So I'm trying to adapt my thinking to a 100% object oriented environment, and my head is spinning just a little. My app will have a large collection of classes Most of these classes will only really need one instance. So I was thinking: static classes. I'm not really sure why, but much of what I've read here says that if my class is going to hold a state, which I take to mean any property values at all, I should use a singleton structure instead. Okay. But there are people out there who for reasons that escape me, think that singletons are evil too. None of these classes is in danger of being used anywhere except in this program. So they could certainly work fine as regular objects (vs singletons or static classes) Then there's the issue of interaction between objects. I'm tempted to create a Global class full of public static properties referencing the single instances of many of these classes. I've also considered just making them properties (static or instance, not sure which) of the MainForm. Then I'd have each of my classes be aware of the MainForm as Owner. Then the various objects could refer to each other as Owner.Object1, Owner.Object2, etc. I fear I'm running out of electronic ink, or at least taxing the patience of anyone kind enough to have stuck with me this long. I hope I have clearly explained my state of utter confusion. I'm just looking for some advice on best practices in my situation. All input is welcome and appreciated. Thanks in advance, David Jennings

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