Why are so many web languages interpreted rather than compiled?
Why didn't languages such as C end up being using for web dev? Surely the speed increases from being compiled would be useful for heavy load sites? ...
historical
Is there a tool for creating historical report out of j/nunit results
Looking for a way to get a visual report about: overall test success percentage over time (information about if and how quickly tests are going greener) visualised single test results over time (to easily notice test gone red that has been green for long time or vice versa to pay attention to a test that has just gone green) any other ...
Programming language named "C Set 2"
Does anyone know anything about a programming language named "C Set 2" which is referenced in the SEI statistics on function point metrics? I tried to google something about this programming language but this languages name is a collection of non-googlish keywords. ...
Is there a defined and accepted standard SQL language?
I remember in college taking a database class where we, the students, were given the ability to choose our Database Management System. Being my first experience with databases I remember being confused that there were different syntax to the SQL statements depending upon which Database Management System used. Up until this class I was un...
Where can I download stock historical data for 5 years?
Where can I download stocks' historical data for 5 years for the stock markets: NASDAQ, DJIA, FTSE100, NIKKEI ? Thanks. ...
Are really great programmers known to use unit testing?
I was wondering if really great programmers (Knuth, Kernighan, Torvalds, etc) are advocates of extensive unit testing. I can imagine large projects they've worked on adding them to deal with collaboration scaling issues, but did, say, Knuth use unit tests in TeX? And this doesn't weigh on my decision to use them, it's just a matter of cu...
How was the first compiler written?
I heard about the chicken and the egg and bootstrapping. I have a few questions. What wrote the first compiler that converted something into binary instructions? Is assembly compiled or translated into binary instructions? ...I'd find it hard to believe they wrote a compiler in binary. ...
Why the name main for function main()
Why the function name main() is retained in many languages like C, C++, Java? Why not any other names for that function? Is there any common structure for all these 3 main() (in C, C++, Java) ...
What is the largest program ever written?
In a fit of idle curiosity, I was wondering that the largest program ever written was. What did it do? What language was it written in? How successful was it? How buggy was it? How many man years did it take to create? I realise that 'largest' and 'program' are both a bit ill-defined. For the sake of argument I am defining it as a singl...
Historical Forecast or Observed Weather Data Source
I'm looking for an API that provides recent, 3-hourly temperatures... either observed or forecasted. To be clear, I'm looking for data from the past... like 'yesterday'. Free or paid is fine. International or US only is fine. Lookup by long/lat, zip, city doesn't matter either. Any suggestions? ...
Have any classic NES games been open-sourced?
I just played a game of RBI Baseball in a browser window. That in and of itself strikes me as simply amazing. When I was young, the NES was a magical box, capable of providing hours of enjoyment to young kids throughout the world. Now, decades later, I'm a programmer. And I can appreciate the programming that went into games that were ...
How can I work with dates before 1900 in PHP?
I am using PHP and jQuery to build an interactive timeline which needs to display dates between 1500 and 2020. I usually use PHP's strtotime function when working with dates, but it does not work for dates pre-1900. The dates will come from a MySQL database, and are formatted as strings such as "January 31, 1654" (this may not be the id...
Why is RAISERROR misspelled? Or is it not?
Why isn't RAISERROR spelled RAISEERROR? Where is the second E? I could understand if it were some ancient keyword length constraint, but I wouldn't expect it to be a nine-character limit. Is RAIS or RROR a technical word such that "raise-error" is just a mis-reading? Are its (immediate) origins in a different language? I've search...
How does FeedJack fetches historical feeds
I am building a news aggregation website and I am looking for a way to fetch old feeds(of any particular website ) into the system. During this course, I stumbled on to Feedjack. It is said that it handles what I needed. So I started diving into the source code. (I dont want to plugit in my django project directly.) All I see is this lin...
What Is the Purpose of the `:' (colon) GNU Bash Builtin?
The question says it: what would be the purpose of a command that does nothing, being little more than a comment leader, but actually a shell built-in in and of itself. It's slower than inserting a comment into your scripts, by about 40% per call, which probably varies greatly on the size of the comment. The only possible reasons I can ...
Where can I find PHP manuals for previous versions?
The excellent PHP Manual is often cited as one of the reasons for the success of PHP, but it covers the latest releases of the language. This can be quite frustrating if you are trying to use features that are under active development, and only partially exist in older versions: for example working with PHP 5.2.* but trying to use the 5...
Historical aggregate Twitter data
Hi, I want to graph the number of tweets and the number of followers over the last three months, but I haven't been able to find a way to do that either through the API or any ready-made tool. I tried TwitterCounter, but the data they provided was basically the result of some sort of interpolation function, not based on actual historic...