This is more of a product philosophy/software architecture question. If you are writing a business application, groupware, bug tracker, etc. you'd come across a client demanding "I want field XYZ in this entity." You know the field is too specific for the organization's needs and/or the terminology does not fit your product. Do we give...
Software engineering shares many of the same traits with other engineering disciplines (attention to detail, complexity to mastery). What do you think differentiates it? Please be specific and substantiate your answer. ...
Every time I come across an implementation of the singleton pattern or any static classes (i.e. classes with (almost) only static members) I wonder whether this isn't actually a hack and therefore heavy abuse of the principle of classes and instances just to design single objects instead of designing classes and creating a single instanc...
I've lately been thinking a lot about alternatives to the class-based approach to object-orientation. One thing which bugs me in today's languages is that we often use static classes / singletons to design single (global) objects because there isn't any other way to do it, so in my opinion it's rather a hack than a feature. Another thing...
Thanks to "Uncle Bob's" recent pontifications on Hanselminutes and the Stackoverflow podcasts, as well as Jeff and Joel's appropriate disrespect of the "SOLID" principles, I've given a lot of thought to questions like "How perfect does a program really have to be?"; "How closely does it need to follow standards and 'best practice' templa...
I read this question and thought that would easily be solved (not that it isn't solvable without) if one could write: @Override public String toString() { return super.super.toString(); } I'm not sure if it is useful in many cases, but I wonder why it isn't and if something like this exists in other languages. What do you guys t...
I was just looking at our issue tracker, and out of nowhere came the question: Will this ever be complete? Has any software project ever finished because it is complete? This has never happened to me. There has always been more features that I could add, or more requests from the customer. So my question to SO users - did you ever ge...
(I understand that someone else asked a similar question and it was closed as 'argumentative', but I'm really interested in understanding the arguments around this.) I know JavaScript really well. I've been writing it professionally for years. I've internalized a lot of the cross-browser incompatibilities and sketchiness, know DOM manip...
one of the things i like most about cocoa is the readability factor. but... one of the things that annoys me most is the convention of convenience constructors to stutter. what I mean is this: [NSString stringWithString:s] [NSNumber numberWithDouble:d] [NSValue valueWithInt:i] [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:] etc... ...
Certain programming languages tend to give you a lot of liberty (C/C++) while others seem to have certain restrictions (C# and Java). Is it better to let programmers have liberty (pointers, destructors, multiple inheritance etc.) or to limit them (garbage collector, etc.)? ...
I've been tasked at work to write a detailed engineering plan for a logistics application that we are coding to propose to a customer. I have been told that it is a data-driven application. What does it mean for an application to be "data-driven"? What is the opposite? I can't seem to get any really clear answer for this although while w...
I marked this as Community Wiki since this might be more on the philosophical side of things, but I've been thinking about this on and off for a while. Basically the idea is this: With MVC you have the controller that churns information, the model that carries it, and the view that displays it. It's a simple separation on paper. If I...
We've all been there. You have written some code and unit tests, the tests all pass, and the code is decent (nothing's perfect, right?). Then, someone who is sure that they know better than you comes along and decides to change your code or the interfaces to your code just because he/she does not like the variable/class names that you ...
We are trying to compare 7 different programming technologies for browser based client applications. Please give your thoughts on this speed comparison. What will the future bring? Will HTML5 replaces Flash and Silverlight in the browser or will JavaScript always be too slow for any CPU intensive applications. Could Roozz plugin comp...
Hey, how do you name your groovy scripts? Does it depends on the enviroment? Do you name groovy classes diffent to groovy scripts? Example: convert_csv_to_xml.groovy ConvertCSVtoXML.groovy ... What do you think? ...
Returning a new object on overloaded operators seems the only thing to do. Right? If you have a class (X) that contains a large buffer Part of the buffer contains content, rest is free. You have overloaded the binary + operator to merge two objects (of same type) by creating a new object containing the appended contents of both operan...
It's a familiar problem: I've got some changes to push up the dev > staging > production chain, but in the mean time, content and users have been added to the database on the production server. I work with drupal a lot, and it's lousy at this because so much of the configuration winds up in the db. (There are some solutions that try to ...
Let's take a look at the infamous IDisposable interface: [ComVisible(true)] public interface IDisposable { void Dispose(); } and a typical implementation, as recommended by MSDN (I omitted the check if current object has already been disposed): public class Base : IDisposable { protected virtual void Dispose(bool disposing) ...
Title is self explaining. ...
Do I need always import all I need in the beginning of the script? Use import immediately before using things from this? What to do if import thing uses several times? What is good style of using import in Python? ...