In an effort to spark some discussion and to find interesting people that I didn't know about, is there anybody around the software industry that you really admire? Perhaps admire is the wrong choice of word, but I'm sure there is somebody out there that has impacted you in a minor way. What did you learn from this individual that defi...
If you can remember that far back, what did the first computer program you ever wrote do (once you had finished debugging it)? ...
When java was young, people were excited about writing applets. They were cool and popular, for a little while. Now, I never see them anymore. Instead we have flash, javascript, and a plethora of other web app-building technologies. Why don't sites use java applets anymore? I'm also curious: historically, why do you think this occur...
How do I get the history of commits that have been made to the repository for a particular user? I am able to access CVS either through the command line or TortioseCVS, so a solution using either method is sufficient. ...
Does anyone know where the term escaping -- as in "escaping a character in a string" -- originates from? Update: Paul Tomblin's answer, although rather brief, lead to the most compelling evidence. Within the paper he linked to there is the following citation: "4. Expansion of Set Future expansion to a set larger than 120 may ta...
OK -- a bit of an undefined question (is the pattern of plugs in an Eniac plugboard a language ??) but contenders include: Konrad Zuse's PlanKalkül (1940s) - never implemented (generally accepted as the first). Whatever Ada Lovelace (1840s) programmed in (not Ada) -- if she is the first programmer, as everyone says, she must have used...
I'm using CVS on Windows (with the WinCVS front end), and would like to add details of the last check in to the email from our automated build process, whenever a build fails, in order to make it easier to fix. I need to know the files that have changed, the user that changed them, and the comment. I've been trying to work out the comm...
This question was already asked in the context of C#/.Net. Now I'd like to learn the differences between a struct and a class in (unmanaged) C++. Please discuss the technical differences as well as reasons for choosing one or the other in OO design. I'll start with an obvious difference: If you don't specify public: or private:, memb...
I have a co-worker that maintains that TRUE used to be defined as 0 and all other values were FALSE. I could swear that every language I've worked with, if you could even get a value for a boolean, that the value for FALSE is 0. Did TRUE used to be 0? If so, when did we switch? ...
I´m looking for publications about the history of the internet browser. Papers, articles Blog posts whatever. Cannot find anything on ACM IEEE etc. and my blog search also didn´t reveal anything remarkable. Please help ...
My application has a command line interface, and I'm thinking about using the GNU Readline library to provide history, an editable command line, etc. The hitch is that my commands can be quite long and complex (think SQL) and I'd like to allow users to spread commands over multiple lines to make them more readable in the history. Is it...
Another question asked about determining odd/evenness in C, and the idiomatic (x & 1) approach was correctly flagged as broken for one's complement-based systems, which the C standard allows for. Do systems really exist in the 'real world' outside of computer museums? I've been coding since the 1970's and I'm pretty sure I've never met ...
Computing as a discipline in its own right (rather than as a discussion of whether it is Mathematics or Physics) is a reasonably young science. Wherever you trace its roots (e.g. Turing's paper in 1936, Babbage's engines, ATLAS, ENIAC or LEO) it's much younger than most modern nation states. I've been programming (using the loosest def...
Does my question make sense? Using either Vim or Emacs, you come to understand that the interface exposes the code's representation of the state of the file you are editing in the buffer, the file is the on-disk storage you can fill a buffer from or write a buffer to. All these things a programmer would know, but when just editing text, ...
Hi, I want to create a history table to track field changes across a number of tables in DB2. I know history is usually done with copying an entire table's structure and giving it a suffixed name (e.g. user --> user_history). Then you can use a pretty simple trigger to copy the old record into the history table on an UPDATE. However, ...
What's the story behind our massive repitition of './foo' and 'cd ..'. Where do these two '.' and '..' come from? Where could they be seen as a way of navigating a file system tree for the first time? I seem to have formulated this question a bit vague. Answers to earliest reference have been found, however, the question remains to why ...
I have an have an ASP.Net page which contains a button. This Page contains a ServerSide Paypal button. When pushed my server does various clever things on the back end and then rewrites the response as a form and some javascript which posts this form to paypal.. This all works great. However, if the user then elects to click back, the...
I am interested in finding out what were considered important attributes of a developer in the early days of programming, i.e., 1950s, 1960s, or early 1970s. Post any examples/materials you have: interview questions, developer tests, expected experience, personality assessments, anything that was used to evaluate a programmer before Micr...
Within the GUI of VSS it is possible to view the history of an item 'including' or 'excluding' the labels. I'm trying to do the same thing but from the command line but I just can't see which switch I need to use in order to 'exclude' labels (by default they are included). e.g. I'm running:- ss.exe HISTORY -I- $/Source/Path/FileName.t...
So, title says it all. Why are floating point values so prolific in computer programming. Due to problems like rounding errors, and not being able to even accurately represent numbers such as 0.1, I really can't see how they got as far as they did. I understand that the computation is faster with floating point numbers, however, I ...