I'm at a business college where we're doing a unit on presentations. Everyone's been asked to pick a topic and do a 2-minute presentation on that topic. I believe I'm the only programmer in the place, so I was thinking of doing a very simple presentation in which I write some very small programs and run them to show the output on the pro...
It's not a programming questions. But this question has been bugging me for awhile. You know when you start typing in Start Search box in Vista Start Menu, applications are appearing in the list from which you can select them. My question is how can I add my applications so they appear in that list. For example: I use many apps from S...
It was just mentioned that I'm "not exactly building the Sistine Chapel." This is true, but I am building a freight management application, which isn't exactly as simple as drawing controls on a form (even though the vendors would have you believe it is). I don't hold this against the person who said it, but I do feel the complexity of...
A friend of mine asked me the other day if I'm just looking at lists of numbers when I'm programming, or how it works. I tried to explain that it's generally more like math formulae, with the odd english word tossed in, and that it's generally mostly readable. But that's a very vague explanation, and it doesn't really explain much to a n...
Can anyone give me an example of successful non-programmer, 5GL (not that I am sure what they are!), visual, 0 source code or similar tools that business users or analysts can use to create applications? I don’t believe there are and I would like to be proven wrong. At the company that I work at, we have developed in-house MVC that we u...
Hi, Im trying to teach python to a Law student (happens to be my fiancee).She has been insisting on me teaching her about it. One problem: She doesn't know anything about programming. I was thinking on starting with dive into python, but i'm worried most not about the python part, but the "she does not know anything about programming"...
Possible Duplicate: What is a good example to show to a non-programmer to explain what programming looks like? Programmers seem to live in a world of their own (as this site indicates), with their own vibrant culture - and their own premises and vocabulary. Once we've been in the field for a bit, we take a lot of things for gr...
Real world scenarios (here "you" means "I") : You are doing undergraduate "research" (in reality programming) for a theoretical CS professor who is a lousy programmer in general, let alone in the language that you will be using. You are trying to help a friend with an IT aspect of his/her startup idea. You are trying to pick up a prog...
What are good programming aphorisms and advice which originate from the non-programming world? To get a better idea of what I mean, here are some examples: DRY / DIE. "Don't repeat yourself" and "Duplication is evil" are both aphorism which are derived from Occam's Razor, aka "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity" (entia ...
I'm currently a student in college learning, and for the most part enjoying, the wonderful world of programming. I'm lucky enough to know about SO, and have a friend who's been in the game since he was fairly young, so I get exposed to some things that haven't come up in class. One such thing was the conditional ?: operator. I had no i...
I have had previous exposure to imperative languages (C, some Java) however I would say I had no experience in programming. Therefore: treating me as a non-programmer, would Haskell be suitable as a first language? My interests in Pure Mathmatics and CS seem to align to the intention of most Haskell tutorials, and although i can inhere...
We are currently looking for ways to help the non-programming members of the sysadmin group familiarize themselves with Python scripts used for day-to-day sysadmin tasks. Does anyone have any suggested documentation tools or best practices that we might find useful for this purpose? Edit to address S.Lott's comment: First, my apologie...