Today's Question:  What does your personal desk look like?        GIVE A SHOUT

SEARCH KEYWORD -- Programming advice



  Text editor vs IDE

A meaningless editor war Many people like to debate which editor is the best. The biggest controversy is between Emacs and vi. vi supporters like to say: "Look it's very fast to type in vi, our fingers no need to leave the keyboard, we even no need to use the up,down,left and right keys" Emacs supporters often downplayed this and said: "What's the use of typing fast if I just need to press one key and it equals to dozens keys you type in vi?"In fact, there is another group of people who like to ...

   Editor,IDE,Structured editor,vi     2013-05-20 12:03:39

  Unix Philosophy

First, let me tell two stories.The first one is one Japan soap factory had a problem that they sometimes shipped empty boxes to the customer without soap inside. So they spend much time and money to invent a X-ray machine to check whether the soap box is empty.The same thing happens in a small factory which doesn't have too much money. The solution of them to solve this problem is they use a desk fan to blow the empty boxes out of the belt and into a bin.The second story is NASA finds that in sp...

   Unix Philosophy,Simple,Rules     2012-05-06 06:49:26

  Faster than C

Judging the performance of programming languages, usually C is called the leader, though Fortran is often faster. New programming languages commonly use C as their reference and they are really proud to be only so much slower than C. Few language designer try to beat C. What does it take for a language to be faster than C? Better Aliasing Information Aliasing describes the fact that two references might point to the same memory location. For example, consider the canonical memory copy: void...

   C,Performance,Speed,Fortran,Criteria     2012-03-25 09:12:23

  The Day Programmer vs. The Night Programmer

This post is a slightly edited form of an e-mail that I sent around internally last year. But it was suggested to me recently that I post it up to my blog to see what people think – am I right or wrong? Over the years I’ve come to the belief that there are two kinds of programmer in the world, no matter what technology they work with, lets call them:         1. Day Programmers        2. Night Programmers Now ...

   Programmer,Day programmer,Night programmer,Difference     2012-03-05 05:12:09

  Test-Driven Development? Give me a break...

Update: At the bottom of this post, I've linked to two large and quite different discussions of this post, both of which are worth reading... Update 2: If the contents of this post make you angry, okay. It was written somewhat brashly. But, if the title alone makes you angry, and you decide this is an article about "Why Testing Code Sucks" without having read it, you've missed the point. Or I explained it badly :-)Some things programmers say can be massive red flags. When I h...

   Test driven,Application design,tool     2011-10-17 10:19:16

  Illiterate Programming

Donald Knuth cleverly imprisoned the phrase "Literate Programming" - if you're not documenting your source with his particular methodology then you must be a proponent of "Illiterate Programming," which sounds truly awful. I very much believe in documented code but I think no amount of pontification in English will ever make a piece of code clearer than the code itself (I'm not talking about project or API documentation). I'm also not talking about the super...

   Programming,Illiterate     2012-02-10 06:20:52

  Interesting program comments

With Google Code Search, we can search some interesting code snippets comments. Some of them are interesting. Programming is not a boring task if you have a good attitude. Lets see some funny comments. Have fun.Not very confident :Dragon everywhere :One more angry comment :I told them earlier:F**K:Don't look following programs:Author :  陈皓 Source : http://coolshell.cn/articles/290.html...

   Programming,comment,interesting     2012-04-23 06:51:05

  Scala, Patterns and The Perl Effect

He tried to understand that one concept for a couple of months before it made sense to him. Admittedly, partial functions are not intuitive for anyone who has been schooled in traditional programming, but still, looking at the problem he was trying to solve it seemed like James was required to expend too much effort relative to the simplicity of the problem (as he pointed out, now that he understands the concept it seems straightforward). He showed me the code, and it was basically a situa...

   Scala,Perl,Pattern,Partial function,Template     2011-12-21 09:25:41

  Why Only Designers Can Create New Programming Languages

Attempts to verify the utility of languages stifle innovation. Christopher Mims 03/06/2012 30 Comments Compared to the versions that are hacked together late at night under insane deadline pressure, the programming languages to come out of academia are failures. Well, not all of them. History can speak for itself. Via UC Irvine computer scientist Cristina Videira Lopes, who deserves credit for any insight you might get from this post, which is a ...

   Designer,Programming language,Create,Great     2012-03-19 13:22:15

  Use downcase! with caution in Ruby

Ruby provides ! to change state of some object in place. Hence if you see some functions have ! appended, it means the state of the caller of the function is expected to be changed. This is a very interesting Ruby feature. But sometimes one should be cautious when using this kind of functions because you would get unexpected behavior if using improperly. Let's take an example of String#downcase!. According to the documentation. Downcases the contents of str, returning nil if...

   RUBY,EXCLAMATION MARK,DOWNCASE     2017-02-10 06:34:44