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  PHP Sucks! But I Like It!

I read a rather interesting post yesterday called PHP: a fractal of bad design. It's been getting a lot of traffic among the PHP community lately because it's rather inflammatory. But to be honest, it does make a lot of really good points. It also makes a lot of mistakes and misses a bigger picture. A Few Mistakes The post makes quite a few mistakes and odd apples to oranges comparisons. Let me point out the major ones that I saw. No Debugger - PHP has xdebug which works quite...

   PHP,Bad design,Like     2012-04-12 06:15:42

  Getting started with C++ TR1 regular expressions

Overview This article is written for the benefit of someone familiar with regular expressions but not with the use of regular expressions in C++ via the TR1 (C++ Standards Committee Technical Report 1) extensions. Comparisons will be made with Perl for those familiar with Perl, though no knowledge of Perl is required. The focus is not on the syntax of regular expressions per se but rather how to use regular expressions to search for patterns and make replacements. Support for TR1 ext...

   Regular expression,Replace,TR1,Extension     2011-08-14 07:25:20

  A Different Kind of Technical Interview

Everyone who's been programming professionally for a while knows the standard format of the technical interview. You go in, there's a whiteboard in the room, and you write code on it to answer questions.Everyone also has the same basic complaints about these interviews. In a normal work environment, you have access to an API or search engine, but at a whiteboard you don't. Whiteboard questions generally don't include much in the way of overall design, and they're typically limited to simple algo...

   Interview,Programming,Methods,Pairing     2011-06-04 07:56:21

  bcrypt: Safeguarding Passwords with Strong Hashing and Adaptive Security

Introduction In today's digital world, passwords play a crucial role in protecting personal privacy and information security. Passwords are the most commonly used means of authentication because they are simple yet effective. Password security is the cornerstone of cybersecurity and plays a fundamental role in safeguarding the information security of individuals and organizations. However, with the increasing frequency and complexity of cyberattacks, traditional password hashing algorithms like ...

   BCRYPT,SECURITY     2023-11-15 08:14:35

  From College To Silicon Valley: Tips From A Veteran

Editor’s note: Pedram Keyani has been an engineer at Facebook since 2007. He is a manager on the Site Integrity team, the inventor of Keg Presence and a Hackathon enthusiast. Looking for internships and jobs after college can be exhilarating, especially for people with engineering and other technical expertise. In an otherwise tough job market, demand for software engineers is higher than ever right now. You may find that companies are actually competing to pay you for the knowledge y...

   Career,College,Silicon valley,Transition,Experience     2012-02-20 05:34:24

  The Wasteful Legacy of Programming as Language

A few years ago I visited a friend who is a graduate student in linguistics. After some time he asked me if I was aware of the work by Chomsky on formal languages. I told him that yes, Chomsky work was a basis for much of the developments in theoretical computer science. More than that, I was glad to learn that there was something technical that I could share and discuss with other people in linguistics. At the time I found this was just a great coincidence. It was only recently, though, t...

   Programming language,Human language,Chomsky     2011-11-28 10:36:34

  Use pdb to help understand python program

  As I have mentioned in Why do I need a debugger?: (3) Debugger is a good tool to help you understand code. So when I come across difficulty to understand vfscount.py code in bcc project, I know it is time to resort to pdb, python's debugger, to help me. The thing which confuses me is here: counts = b.get_table("counts") for k, v in sorted(counts.items(), key=lambda counts: counts[1].value): print("%-16x %-26s %8d" % (k.ip, b.ksym(k.ip), v.val...

       2017-08-22 22:42:37

  Why Do Some People Learn Faster?

The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as “a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” Bohr’s quip summarizes one of the essential lessons of learning, which is that people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Education isn’t magic. Education is the wisdom wrung from failure. A new study, forthcoming in Psychological Science, and led by Jason Moser at Michigan State University, expands on this ...

   Learn,Speed,Reason,Analysis     2012-02-24 05:04:46

  Signs that you're a bad programmer

1. Inability to reason about codeReasoning about code means being able to follow the execution path ("running the program in your head") while knowing what the goal of the code is.SymptomsThe presence of "voodoo code", or code that has no effect on the goal of the program but is diligently maintained anyway (such as initializing variables that are never used, calling functions that are irrelevant to the goal, producing output that is not used, etc.)Executing idempotent functions multiple times (...

   Sign,Programmer,Characteristics,Knowledge,Skill     2011-10-20 08:56:16

  The ugliest C feature:

<tgmath.h> is a header provided by the standard C library, introduced in C99 to allow easier porting of Fortran numerical software to C. Fortran, unlike C, provides “intrinsic functions”, which are a part of the language and behave more like operators. While ordinary (“external”) functions behave similarly to C functions with respect to types (the types of arguments and parameters must match and the restult type is fixed), intrinsic functions accept arguments of...

   C,,Fortran,Intrinsic functions,C99,Ugly     2011-12-26 08:33:27

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