Over the last couple of years, I’ve done a lot of pair programming. Pair programming inside my team, at customer sites, in coding dojos and in my open source projects.Pair programming is really a great and effective experience when performed by an pair of developers knowing how to pair program.Unfortunately, you cannot just put two developers in front of a single computer and expect them to perform perfectly from the start. Pair programming has to be learned. Both developers need to learn the difference between being the driver (the one holding the keyboard) and the navigator. See here ...

I love to profile applications, because I always learn something that surprises me.Initial Profiler Surprise: Client SideCase in point, I was recently profiling our Android application, the Famigo Sandbox. This app sends a lot of data back and forth with our API, as we try to determine which of the apps on your phone are safe for your kids. I always assumed that, if app performance suffered during some of the chattier features, it was probably due to slow cell reception.The profiler told me that I was wrong; the tran...

In this article, I would like to discuss why you should use Lua. Thisall started with a message that recently popped up on theLua mailing list regarding why isn't Lua more widelyused? The answerswent from randomness to lack of libraries to a variety of other things, but theone that resonated with me most was that there are fewer people who enjoy thedo it yourselfapproach, which Lua fully embraces. I've come to think of Lua as the ArchLinux of programming languages. Which, almost bydefinition, means fewer people will enjoy Lua rather than more. So then whywould you want to use Lua? In no...

Lets compare some Python to Haskell for solving the same problem.  The problem we’ll pick is Trie data-structure for auto-completions.  We are interested not so much in the nitty gritty of the algorithm, but in the language style itself.  Auto-complete has been in the programming news a lot recently; both a Python and a Haskell solver have turned up.(I suspect this post got flagged on Hacker News :(  It never got on the front-page despite the rapid upvoting on a no-news night)Here’s the Python:"""A fast data structure for searching strings with autocomplete su...

Now that you have downloaded the latest WTL release (v8.1 at the time of this writing), you will find out that it doesn’t have any project wizards for Visual Studio 2010. That’s a relatively easily fix. Just go ahead and download the latest build from the repository at AppWiz.tar.gz-view=tar. Extract the .tar file and you will find the JavaScript install scripts for VS 2010:I recommend you to extract the files to the same location were you installed the WTL files. In my case this would be c:\WTL.  Double click the setup100.js file (or setp100x.js for Visual Studio 2010 Expre...

If you want to create a folder at windows using c++/cpp language, there is an easy way for make a folder. You can do it just including the <windows.h> header file. To make a folder at C:\ drive named "deadman"#include<windows.h>int main(){   CreateDirectory ("C:\\deadman", NULL);   return 0;}If you want to delete a fodler from the C:\ directory.#include<windows.h>int main(){   RemoveDirectory("C:\\deadman");   return 0;}Also you can use the system command from c++ to create or delete a fodler. for examplesystem("mkdi...

Closures in Java are a hot topic of late. A few really smart people are drafting a proposal to add closures to a future version of the language. However, the proposed syntax and the linguistic addition are getting a lot of push back from many Java programmers. Today, Elliotte Rusty Harold posted his doubts about the merits of closures in Java. Specifically, he asks "Why Hate the for Loop?": I don’t know what it is some people have against for loops that they’re so eager to get rid of them. This isn’t the first or even the second time CS theorists have revolted against ...

We’ve finally reached the point in this series that I’ve been waiting for. In this post I am going to share the most crucial piece of floating-point math knowledge that I have. Here it is:[Floating-point] math is hard.You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly hard it is. I mean, you may think it’s difficult to calculate when trains from Chicago and Los Angeles will collide, but that’s just peanuts to floating-point math.Seriously. Each time I think that I’ve wrapped my head around the subtleties and implications of floating-point math ...