For decades, in the field of computing (except disk manufacturers), a KB (kilobyte) was understood to mean 1024 bytes. In the past few years, there has been a movement to use KiB ("kibibyte") to mean 1024 bytes, and change the meaning of kilobyte to be 1000 bytes, dooming us to many more years of confusion. On the other hand, the movemen...
You are joining a project to maintain an existing system. There is no written documentation at all, but the previous team offers to write one piece of documentation. And they are going to let you decide what it should cover: What is the single most important piece of documentation? This is a poll: give only one document type per answer ...
I have a colleague that handles tech support, and her role involves a lot of transforming ASCII files from one format to another and occasionally reporting on them. The formats tend to be largely plain text with an occasional bit of XML. She regularly gets me to write small scripts to do these transformatsions, and also batch files for...
I have heard that there is lots of interesting and useful WSGI middleware around. However, I am not sure which ones (apart from the ones that are part of pylons) are useful and stable. What is your favourite WSGI middleware? ...
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...
What techniques are there to prevent ballot stuffing in online polls while allowing anonymous users to vote? ...
I ask because I am in need of some examples of spectacular documentation to do a little compare/contrast. Bad documentation abounds but who gets it stone cold correct? I suppose we should differentiate between documentation geared at informing experts and documentation geared at teaching new users but if you know of something that combi...
What is the best comment in source code you have ever encountered? ...
The system consists of a hardware device and a PC. The PC runs a GUI that controls the hardware device. To test the device various test hardware is used that can be controlled by RS232 or GPIB. To automate this testing the test software would have to control the test hardware and interact with the PC GUI. What is the best way you know o...
What is that single action you do over and over again during your development time? What task eats your development time like nothing else? What is the task you want to perform, but you never convince yourself to do, because it would take forever to accomplish? Please, provide environment information relevant to the task you mention...
In the spirit of "fun polls"... What is your favorite esoteric programming language? Guidelines: One language per response, upvote to echo others' responses If you can, describe what makes it your favorite Provide a code sample (if practical) See Also: Is it worth it to learn an esoteric programming language? What is the stranges...
For a long time ago, I have thought that, in java, reversing the domain you own for package naming is silly and awkward. Which do you use for package naming in your projects? ...
I would like to track metrics that can be used to improve my team’s software development process, improve time estimates, and detect special case variations that need to be addressed during the project execution. Please limit each answer to a single metric, describe how to use it, and vote up the good answers. ...
What are your favorite personal projects? What I mean is a project that you designed and worked on without getting paid for it - but had fun developing. If you had a team of other people working on it as well, that is OK too. This can be in any language; or a program you wrote that did something another one did. Multiple posts are welc...
You often see, on sites like The Daily WTF, examples of overengineered code that should have just been a call to a built-in method within the .NET framework. What namespaces/classes should be considered essential knowledge for a developer starting his/her first .NET job? As per Joel Spolsky's instruction for these types of questions, p...
What is your favorite essay about programming? Something which has made you think, or made you a better programmer. Something that you feel portrays the field well, or maybe that was just hilarious to read. Some of my choices would be some of Paul Graham's essays, such as Hackers and Painters. The Cathedral and the Bazaar is also up th...
How does your organization resist regression to the mean. By this I mean how do you keep the "accepted practices" from domination, stifling innovation and original thinking. Do your architects dictate methodologies so that innovators have to hide their work? Is the path chosen which the average programmer can handle in favor of the mo...
In a Channel 9 interview, David Callahan of Microsoft said, Yes we would like to give you perfectly safe tools. That would require a complete rewrite of the infrastructure on up. So instead we will give you strong, effective tools and guidance on how to use them. Is this really a good idea? Should be just continue refining our tool...
What are some possibly unique development standards in your country? In general Information on the internet is focused around practices, standards and current programming tendencies in western countries, specifically the U.S.A. However that tends to be "biased" as one might say. So it'd be fun if developers overseas could compile some s...
I'm interested in compilers, interpreters and languages. What is the most interesting, but forgotten or unknown, language you know about? And more importantly, why? I'm interested both in compiled, interpreted and VM languages, but not esoteric languages like Whitespace or BF. Open source would be a plus, of course, since I plan to st...