I periodically am called upon to do maintenance work on a system that was built by a real rocket surgeon. There's so much wrong with it that it's hard to know where to start. No, wait, I'll start at the beginning: in the early days of the project, the designer was told that the system would need to scale, and he'd read that a source...
I use both functional and imperative languages daily, and it's rather amusing to see the surge of adoption of functional languages from both sides of the fence. It strikes me, however, that it looks rather like a fad. Do you think that it's a fad? I know the reasons for using functional languages at times and imperative languages in oth...
What is your favorite programming language? This is not the one you use at work, but the one you tend to use for personal projects... the one that you first go to because it most matches your way of thinking / programming style, etc... List the reasons for it, too. ...
There are some cool and exciting features in .NET 3.5/C# 3.0, and with those features comes some darn interesting ways to write the exact same line of code. Using the above stated tool set (and by extension .NET 2.0 stuff), what are the different ways the below code snippet could reasonably be rewritten? string uploadDirectory...
Following this topic, what is the best (as in witty and/or funny) commit message you have ever encountered? For example, here's the message for a commit I made a few minutes ago: This change should have never been made. It kills little children. NOTE TO SELF: Don't do everything [the boss] tells you immediately. ...
The last couple months I've started keeping a journal relating to my software development. I've found that's it's been helpful for keeping track of software requests and the changes and discoveries necessary in fixing an issue or keeping track of system infrastructure changes. I've also found that it's a nice way to slow down for a mom...
Why did you get into programming, and how old were you? It'd certainly be interesting to see the reasons for a large sample of programmers. ...
Excluding everything that's in System.Math. I think that System.Math is woefully inadequate. For example, in several official .Net frameworks, I can count 3 different implementations of matrices. Same goes for vectors. One implementation of a complex number; several different implementations of arbitrary rational numbers, and so on. So...
I'd like to include some simple video editing functionality for the python application I'm writing and googling comes up with: pymedia pyglet (using the media module) gst-python Requirements: Small footprint. I'm already using wxpython (just because), which bloats up the final .exe pretty easily so preferably whatever I use to imp...
Everyday we are faced with programming problems ranging from easy to complex. For me it is important to record that knowledge so that I can find it in the future. The features that I consider that most important is recording ease of use (WYSIWIG would be good), good search capabilities and perhaps hierarchical organization or tags enable...
I see some messing with Word and Excel files via add-ins or code-behinds in the near future. Have no prior experience with programming Office solutions.. except a few random hacks... so would like a Getting Started / Cookbook type of book. I've looked up the net and found a few. Unfortunately reviews are rare on these books.. So in cas...
Do you bother initialising java bean values? Say, for example: ([g|s]etters omitted) public class SomeClass { private String foo; private Date bar; private Baz someObject; } (Yes, this is a POJO being used as a bean rather than a Java Bean in the strictest sense) In the empty constructor, do you initialise these memb...
This is the inverse of the "What programming language do you wish would catch on?" question. I was a Delphi programmer for many years, and I still appreciate its power, but I dislike verbose programming languages. So I would love to see Pascal put out to pasture. The same goes for BASIC in any form, despite the fact that it's the langu...
After discussing with a newly arrived developer in my team, I realized that there are still, in C++, habits of using C constructs because they are supposed to be better (i.e. faster, leaner, prettier, pick your reason). What are the examples worth sharing, showing a C constructs, compared to the similar C++ construct? For each example,...
I have a buddy that's the IT guy for his company. He recently asked me about moving some of the applications they have to some managed server somewhere. I recommended Rackspace, but now I'm wondering what other quality options are out there. He needs to host Quickbooks for the accounting department, a couple of low traffic websites, and...
There are a whole raft of questions regarding payment processors for web applications but I haven't seen one yet for desktop applications. What are your experiences? Perhaps to put this into a little context, the requirements: Should be customisable Should be available in Australia at least, if not world wide (less critical). No stora...
For the CS majors out there what were the hardest CS classes or concepts that you learned in your undergraduate schooling? Did you find once you learned the basics,(data structs, OOP fundamentals, discrete math, pointers, recursion, etc) the rest followed naturally or did you hit a wall at any point in your higher classes like OS'es and...
Delphi (the language) has its own syntax and features, and other languages have their own too. As a Delphi developer, what would you like to have in the win32 Delphi compiler? And if you are not a Delphi developer, what features would make you starting using Delphi? Here's my short list Main Features: Cross platform compiler (Revive...
What's the feature you love the most in C#? Does it come from the new .NET 3.5 or is it just from the original C#? It can be as simple as the recommendation for camelCase and PascalCase, or as advanced as anonymous methods. What makes you like the C# language? ...
From Wikipedia: To say that a company "eats its own dog food" means that it uses the products that it makes. So the question is: do you use the software you are developing? ...