Can one language be better than another?
Is it a case by case basis or are there some languages you can compare and really have an honest, non-fanboy, completely measured quality difference between the two? ...
debate
Have we reached the point that a mysite.net is as good as mysite.com?
Although not strictly programming related, this is something I believe us web developers think about a lot more than most people, so I wanted to ask this community. When trying to find domains to launch my projects on I'm still convinced that I must find an available .COM and that perfectname.net is not as good as almostperfectname.com....
database vs. flat files
The company I work for is trying to switch a product that uses flat file format to a database format. We're handling pretty big files of data (ie: 25GB/file) and they get updated really quick. We need to run queries that randomly access the data, as well as in a contiguous way. I am trying to convince them of the advantages of using a da...
Should left outer joins be avoided in DB2
We are having a debate in our company. I use left outer joins quit frequently. I was told by another programmer that there is too much over head and I should not use them. Example, Lets say I have two tables, they would rather me hit the database twice get the information I need from each table store it in memory and join the data on ...
What are the programming religious wars of the generations before our current generation?
Being 32 years old, I did not follow debates in programming, language design, and platforms in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and most of the 1990s. I sometimes hear glimpse of what the major debates were and how they turned the course of history. It makes me wonder what I take for granted. I am curious, what were the debates. The ones I know...
When is it appropriate to intentionally delay an application's actions?
I was in a discussion in another forum where I disagreed with the purpose of intentionally delaying an application's actions, and I'm hoping someone can clarify where doing would be considered acceptable design. The scenario presented by the developer was that in their application, they add a delay of "a second or so" when updating a re...
Reading a difficult book
I am currently reading the by far most difficult book I've ever tried to read. (Windows Internals) Usually I would just read a book without any problems and pretty quickly, but now I feel a bit overwhelmed, so I thought it would be helpful to gain advices from people who probably went through the same thing. So... I'd like to have your o...