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• Harmful temptations in programming

  - by gaearon

  Just curious, what kinds of temptations in programming turned out to be really harmful in your projects? Like when you really feel the urge to do something and you believe it's going to benefit the project or else you just trick yourself into believing it is, and after a week you realize you haven't solved any real problems but instead created new ones or, in the best case, pleased your inner beast with no visible impact. Personally, I find it very hard to not refactor bad code. I work with a lot of bad legacy code, and it takes some deep breaths to not touch it when I have no tests to prove my refactoring doesn't not break anything. Another demon for me in user interface, I can literally spend hours changing UI layout just because I enjoy doing it. Sometimes I tell myself I'm working on usability, but the truth is just I love moving buttons around. What are your programming demons, and how do you avoid them?

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• Finding a good University [closed]

  - by Liamh101

  I've currently been searching for good Universities to study Software Engineering or Computer Science at. The three Universities I've chosen so far are: Brighton University (This is my main pick so far) Plymouth Uni Manchester Metropolitan I would just like to know from people who have actually studied at these places to see if there all that there cracked up to be and I'm not going to be wasting up to four years of my life with a course that isn't very well taught. Would love to hear from people and if there are any Universities in the UK that you are/have studied at and are finding really good for learning Programming that would be nice too. Thanks!

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• Catching typos or other errors in web-based scripting languages

  - by foreyez

  Hi, My background is mainly strongly typed languages (java, c++, c#). Having recently gotten back to a bit of javascript, I found it a bit annoying that if I misspell something by accident (for example I'll type 'myvar' instead of 'myVar') my entire script crashes. The browser itself most of the time doesn't even tell me I have an error, my program will just be blank, etc. Then I have to hunt down my code line by line and find the error which is very time consuming. In the languages I am used to the compiler lets me know if I made a typo. My question to you is, how do you overcome this issue in scripting (javascript)? Can you give me some tips? (this question is mainly aimed at people that have also come from a strongly typed language). Note: I mainly use the terminal/VIM ... this is mainly b/c I like terminal and I SSH alot too

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• What are the benefits vs costs of comment annotation in PHP?

  - by Patrick

  I have just started working with symfony2 and have run across comment annotations. Although comment annotation is not an inherent part of PHP, symfony2 adds support for this feature. My understanding of commenting is that it should make the code more intelligible to the human. The computer shouldn't care what is in comments. What benefits come from doing this type of annotation versus just putting a command in the normal PHP code? ie- /** * @Route("/{id}") * @Method("GET") * @ParamConverter("post", class="SensioBlogBundle:Post") * @Template("SensioBlogBundle:Annot:post.html.twig", vars={"post"}) * @Cache(smaxage="15") */ public function showAction(Post $post) { }

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• Is there such a thing as having too many private functions/methods?

  - by shovonr

  I understand the importance of well documented code. But I also understand the importance of self-documenting code. The easier it is to visually read a particular function, the faster we can move on during software maintenance. With that said, I like to separate big functions into other smaller ones. But I do so to a point where a class can have upwards of five of them just to serve one public method. Now multiply five private methods by five public ones, and you get around twenty-five hidden methods that are probably going to be called only once by those public ones. Sure, it's now easier to read those public methods, but I can't help but think that having too many functions is bad practice.

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• Storing a looong lookup table

  - by inquisitive

  Background The product i am working on has a very long lookup-table. the table contains static data and cannot be auto generated. there are about 500 rows and 10 columns. columns have mostly integers and strings. to complicate the matters, there are actually two such tables. every row in table-1 maps to zero-or-more rows in table-2. we use an SQLite database with two tables. the product installer places the SQLite file in the installation directory. the application is written in dot-net and we use ADO to load the data once on startup. now, the lookup table grows. in each release a month, we add about 10 new entries existing entries are adjusted. every release we fine tune existing entries. The problem a team of (10) developers work on the lookup table. Code goes in the SVN, but the little devil the SQLite does not. this prevents multiple developers to work on it. we do take regular backups of the file, but proper versioning is not possible. we never know who did the breaking change. the worse thing is we dont know if there is any change at all. diff'ing databases is tedious if not impossible. the tables are expected to grow quite large in years to come and we would need developers to work in parallel on it. the data is business critical. we need to be able to audit changes made to it. Question What would be a solution for the problems outlines above? one idea was to transform the whole thing to XML and treat it like just another source file. that way SVN can do the versioning and we can work in parallel. but the data shows relational behavior. with XML we loose the unique and foreign-key constraints. also we cant query it with sql like ease. any help here will be appreciated.

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• What to do as a new team lead on a project with maintainability problems?

  - by Mr_E

  I have just been put in charge of a code project with maintainability problems. What things can I do to get the project on a stable footing? I find myself in a place where we are working with a very large multi-tiered .NET system that is missing a lot of the important things such as unit tests, IOC, MEF, too many static classes, pure datasets etc. I'm only 24 but I've been here for almost three years (this app has been in development for 5) and mostly due to time constraints we've been just adding in more crap to fit the other crap. After doing a number of projects in my free time I have begun to understand just how important all those concepts are. Also due to employee shifting I find myself to now be the team lead on this project and I really want to come up with some smart ways to improve this app. Ways where the value can be explained to management. I have ideas of what I would like to do but they all seem so overwhelming without much upfront gain. Any stories of how people have or would have dealt with this would be a very interesting read. Thanks.

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• Who can change the View in MVC?

  - by Luke

  I'm working on a thick client graph displaying and manipulation application. I'm trying to apply the MVC pattern to our 3D visualization component. Here is what I have for the Model, View, and Controller: Model - The graph and it's metadata. This includes vertices, edges, and the attributes of each. It does not contain position information, icons, colors, or anything display related. View - This would commonly be called a scene graph. It includes the 3D display information, texture information, color information, and anything else that is related specifically to the visualization of the model. Controller - The controller takes the view and displays it in a Window using OpenGL (but it could potentially be any 3D graphics package). The application has various "layouts" that change the position of the vertices in the display. For instance, one layout may arrange the vertices in a circle. Is it common for these layouts to access and change the view directly? Should they go through the Controller to access the View? If they go through the Controller, should they just ask for direct access to the View or should each change go through the controller? I realize this is a bit different from the standard MVC example where there a finite number of Views. In this case, the View can change in an infinite number of ways. Perhaps I'm shattering some basic principle of MVC here. Thanks in advance!

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• How to implement Restricted access to application features

  - by DroidUser

  I'm currently developing a web application, that provides some 'service' to the user. The user will have to select a 'plan' according to which she/he will be allowed to perform application specific actions but up to a limit defined by the plan. A Plan will also limit access to certain features, which will not be available at all for some plans. As an example : say there are 3 plans, 2 actions throughout the application users in plan-1 can perform action-1 3 times, and they can't perform action-2 at all users in plan-2 can perform action-1 10 times, action-2 5 times users in plan-3 can perform action-1 20 times, action-2 10 times So i'm looking for the best way to get this done, and my main concerns besides implementing it, are the following(in no particular order) maintainability/changeability : the number of plans, and type of features/actions will change in the final product industry standard/best practice : for future readiness!! efficiency : ofcourse, i want fast code!! I have never done anything like this before, so i have no clue about how do i go about implementing these functionalities. Any tips/guides/patterns/resources/examples? I did read a little about ACL, RBAC, are they the patterns that i need to follow? Really any sort of feedback will help.

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• Storing hierarchical template into a database

  - by pduersteler

  If this title is ambiguous, feel free to change it, I don't know how to put this in a one-liner. Example: Let's assume you have a html template which contains some custom tags, like <text_field />. We now create a page based on a template containing more of those custom tags. When a user wants to edit the page, he sees a text field. he can input things and save it. This looks fairly easy to set up. You either have something like a template_positions table which stores the content of those fields. Case: I now have a bit of a blockade keeping things as simple as possible. Assume you have the same tag given in your example, and additionally, <layout> and <repeat> tags. Here's an example how they should be used: <repeat> <layout name="image-left"> <image /> <text_field /> </layout> <layout name="image-right"> <text_field /> <image /> </layout> </repeat> We now have a block which can be repeated, obviously. This means: when creting/editing a page containing such a template block, I can choose between a layout image-left and image-right which then gets inserted as content element (where content for <image /> and <text_field /> gets stored). And because this is inside a <repeat>, content elements from the given layouts can be inserted multiple times. How do you store this? Simply said, this could be stored with the same setup I've wrote in the example above, I just need to add a parent_id or something similiar to maintain a hierarchy. but I think I am missing something. At least the relation between an inserted content element and the origin/insertion point is missing. And what happens when I update the template file? Do I have to give every custom tag that acts as editable part of a template an identifier that matches an identifier in the template to substitue them correctly? Or can you think of a clean solution that might be better?

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• Any tips to learn how to program with severe ADHD?

  - by twinbornJoint

  I have a difficult time trying to learn how to program from straight text-books. Video training seems to work well for me in my past experiences with PHP. I am trying my hardest to stay focussed and push through. Specifically I am looking to start indie game development. Over the last two weeks I have been trying to pick the "right" language and framework to develop with. I started going through Python, but I am not really enjoying the language so far. I am constantly looking through this website to compare this language to that, and keep getting distracted. Aside from all of this, is it possible to become a programmer when you have trouble focussing? Has anyone been through this that can recommend some advice? edit - you guys can check my new question out with detailed information thanks to all of the responses from this thread. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/15916/what-is-the-best-language-and-framework-for-my-situation

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• Is this high coupling?

  - by Bono

  Question I'm currently working a on an assignment for school. The assignment is to create a puzzle/calculator program in which you learn how to work with different datastructures (such as Stacks). We have generate infix math strings suchs as "1 + 2 * 3 - 4" and then turn them in to postfix math strings such as "1 2 + 3 * 4 -". In my book the author creates a special class for converting the infix notation to postfix. I was planning on using this but whilst I was about to implement it I was wondering if the following is what you would call "high coupling". I have read something about this (nothing that is taught in the book or anything) and was wondering about the aspect (since I still have to grasp it). Problem I have created a PuzzleGenerator class which generates the infix notation of the puzzle (or math string, whatever you want to call it) when it's instantiated. I was going to make a method getAnswer() in which I would instantiate the InToPost class (the class from the book) to convert the infix to postfox notation and then calculate the answer. But whilst doing this I thought: "Is using the InToPost class inside this method a form a high coupling, and would it be better to place this in a different method?" (such as a "convertPostfixToInfix" method, inside the PuzzleGenerator class) Thanks in advance.

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• returning null vs returning zero, which would be better?

  - by Dark Star1

  I inherited a project that I am managing and having to maintain pending the redevelopment of the code base. At the moment I am being tasked with adding little feature all over the place and have gotten into the habit of returning null instead of zero in parts of the code where I am working on. The problem is we have a client that is using this code and parts of code that require data from my implemented features recieve a null and dump the stack trace in UI. I would like to avoid this entirely from my input but without the nullPointer exceptions there's the potential that errors would be introduced into the client's data which may go un-noticed. Usually I would have come up with my own error notification system but I have never inherited a project before. so I am unsure whether to continue down this path. I still believe that the stack dump is preferable to un-noticed data corruption/inaccuracies.

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• Nexus One Smartphone: Good, Not Great

  The Nexus One smartphone is running behind the iPhone and the Droid and popularity, perhaps with good reason.

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• What Pattern will solve this - fetching dependent record from database

  - by tunmise fasipe

  I have these classes class Match { int MatchID, int TeamID, //used to reference Team ... other fields } Note: Match actually have 2 teams which means 2 TeamID class Team { int TeamID, string TeamName } In my view I need to display List<Match> showing the TeamName. So I added another field class Match { int MatchID, int TeamID, //used to reference Team ... other fields string TeamName; } I can now do Match m = getMatch(id); m.TeamName = getTeamName(m.TeamId); //get name from database But for a List<Match>, getTeamName(TeamId) will go to the database to fetch TeamName for each TeamID. For a page of 10 Matches per page, that could be (10x2Teams)=20 trip to database. To avoid this, I had the idea of loading everything once, store it in memory and only lookup the TeamName in memory. This made me have a rethink that what if the records are 5000 or more. What pattern is used to solve this and how?

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• Entry level engineer question regarding memory mangement

  - by Ealianis

  It has been a few months since I started my position as an entry level software developer. Now that I am past some learning curves (e.g. the language, jargon, syntax of VB and C#) I'm starting to focus on more esoteric topics, as to write better software. A simple question I presented to a fellow coworker was responded with "I'm focusing on the wrong things." While I respect this coworker I do disagree that this is a "wrong thing" to focus upon. Here was the code (in VB) and followed by the question. Note: The Function GenerateAlert() returns an integer. Dim alertID as Integer = GenerateAlert() _errorDictionary.Add(argErrorID, NewErrorInfo(Now(), alertID)) vs... _errorDictionary.Add(argErrorID, New ErrorInfo(Now(), GenerateAlert())) I originally wrote the ladder and rewrote it with the "Dim alertID" so that someone else might find it easier to read. But here was my concern and question. "Should one write this with the Dim AlertID, it would in fact take up more memory; finite but more, and should this method be called many times could it lead to an issue? How will .NET handle this object AlertID. Outside of .NET should one manually dispose of the object after use (near the end of the sub)." I want to ensure I become a knowledgeable programmer that does not just rely upon garbage collection. Am I over thinking this? Am I focusing on the wrong things?

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• Why use other number bases when programming

  - by JMD

  My coworkers and I have been bending our minds to figuring out why anyone would go out of their way to program numbers in a base other than base 10. I suggested that perhaps you could optimize longer equations by putting the variables in the correct base you are working with (for instance, if you have only sets of 5 of something with no remainders you could use base 5), but I'm not sure if that's true. Any thoughts?

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• I am the Webmaster now. Where do I start? [closed]

  - by John C

  I just changed jobs and will soon be in charge of a custom-built ASP.NET CMS and website for a fairly large corporation with global offices. I have IT and developer FTE resources available to me but I am trying to build a list of branding, project, and functionality points to review. What guides or lists can/should I use to evaluate this website before I begin adding features, creating new projects, or even redesigning and redeveloping the site? (I have been a webmaster/designer/developer for small, WordPress/Drupal sites for 10 years. I have been an unofficial webmaster (director/content manager) for a large site for 3 years (no direct development control over Sharepoint administration, IIS, or hosting ... but everything else, I did. Analytics, email, advertising, social, SEO, etc.).) Thank you!

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• Using CSS3 is a bad practice? [closed]

  - by Qmal

  Possible Duplicate: Should I use HTML5 and/or CSS3 to build my website? I just want to know if it's considered as a "bad practice" to use things like rounded corners, gradients and so on... I understand that there are bots and crawlers that do not process CSS, but they don't need to. And nowadays most people use browsers that can process CSS3 with no problem. So should I make my buttons and shadows and such look pretty with CSS3 or with images?

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• What are the advantages and Disadvantages of Using an Aspect Orientated Programming Paradigm

  - by JHarley1

  Ok so here is the question: What are the advantages and Disadvantages of Using an Aspect Orientated Programming Paradigm. My advantages and disadvantages thus far: Advantages: Complements object orientation. Modularizes cross-cutting concerns improving code maintainability and understandability. Disadvantage: Not the easiest of concepts to grasp - not as well documented as O-O O-O goes far enough in the separation of concerns... List item Would anyone like to challenge any of these/ add their own? Many Thanks, J

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• User input and Automated input seperation

  - by tpaksu

  I have a mysql db and I have an automation script which modifies the data inside once a day. And, these columns may have changed by an user manually. What is the best approach to make the system only update the automated data, not the manually edited ones? I mean yes, flagging the cell which is manually edited is one way to do it, but I want to know if there's another way to accomplish this? Just curiosity.

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• Storing Tiled Level Data in J2ME game

  - by Alex

  I'm developing a J2ME game which uses tiled backgrounds for the levels. My question is how do I store this tile information in my game. At the moment it is stored as an array; with each number representing a different tile from the tile-sheet. This works well enough, however I don't like the fact that it is 'hard-coded' into the game because (at least in my opinion) it is harder to edit the levels, or design new ones. I was also thinking that it would be difficult if you wanted to add a 'level pack', I'm not sure on how this would be achieved though; it's not something I was planning on doing, I'm just curious. I was wondering if there was a way I could store level data in some external file and then load this in to the game. The problem is I don't know what the limitations are for J2ME regarding file I/O, can it read in any file like Java? I am aware of the RMS, but from my experience I don't think this would work (unless I am mistaken). Also, would loading the data in this way be too big a performance hit? Or is there another way I can achieve what I am trying to do. As I said, the way I have it at the moment works fine, and if this is the only viable option then it will suffice.

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• Necessary Infrastructure for large project with many components communicating through IPCs

  - by jluzwick

  I have a fairly in depth question which probably doesn't have an exact answer. As a software engineer, I am usually tasked with working on a program or project with minimal understanding of how other components or programs in the project interact with each other. When one program fails in a sea of multiple components and processes, what infrastructure elements are necessary to ensure that the problem can be accurately tracked to the violating application? More specifically, what infrastructure elements should be necessary for this large project and which are optional but very helpful. One such example I can think of is some form of a common logging infrastructure that allows for a developer or tester to easily browse through a log that contains numerous components for messages that might allude to the culprit program along with a "trail" of what happened before the issue occurred. I'm thinking of something similar to Androids alogcat tool. These necessary infrastructure elements should be language-agnostic. While these elements should be understood by all engineers on the team in question, which elements should be understood at great detail by the technical system engineers and what should the individual software engineers be responsible for adding to their tools to allow for such infrastructures to take hold? Please feel free to ask for clarification if something does not make sense as I understand this question is very broad and needs some refinement. I will refine as necessary from the answers and comments I receive. Thanks for any help!

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• Android loading screens blocking, good practice?

  - by Oren

  I've noticed many (if not all) android games don't support the "back" button functionality during their loading screens. Which leads to some frustrating moments when a user accidentally starts up the game and has to wait for the long loading stage to end in order to close it. So my questions are: 1) Why is that ? Is there a good reason to avoid something like asynchronous loading (or some other solution to this problem) in android games ? 2) If there is no good reason not to support this functionality, what would be the best way to accomplish it ?

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• How should UI layer pass user input to BL layer?

  - by BornToCode

  I'm building an n-tier application, I have UI, BL, DAL & Entities (built from POCO) projects. (All projects have a reference to the Entities). My question is - how should I pass user input from the UI to the BL, as a bunch of strings passed to the BL method and the BL will build the object from the parameters, or should I build the objects inside the UI submit_function and send objects as parameters? EDIT: I wrote n-tier application, but what I actually meant was just layers.

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