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  What's Wrong with the For Loop

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...

   For loop,Basic,Problem,Efficiency,Java     2012-02-24 05:06:15

  Python threads: communication and stopping

A very common doubt developers new to Python have is how to use its threads correctly. Specifically, a large amount of questions on StackOverflow show that people struggle most with two aspects: How to stop / kill a threadHow to safely pass data to a thread and back I already have a blog post touching on these issues right here, but I feel it’s too task-specific for sockets, and a more basic and general post would be appropriate. I assume the reader has a basic familiarity with Pytho...

   Python,Multithreading,Communication,Synchronize     2011-12-28 07:38:32

  What It’s Really Like to Work at Google

Google. It’s one of the most common household words in today’s modern society, and yet for a company that is used by most of us essentially as an algorithm, it tends to trigger a highly emotional response when overheard. It’s a dream job for college students nearing graduation, a highly coveted invitation to lunch by friends and colleagues who work near campus, and the bane of existence for those who produce content for the Internet. For several years, most of the publ...

   Google,Work,Life,Workplace     2012-01-18 08:19:00

  Why I Still Use Emacs

At school, I’m known as the Emacs guy; when people have questions about configuring Emacs or making it work a certain way, they often come and ask me. Sometimes, some people ask me why use Emacs at all? Isn’t it a really old editor and aren’t Eclipse or Visual Studio much better? I mean, they don’t have weird key bindings and have intellisense, that’s surely better for a programmer, right? I will attempt in this post to explain some of the reasons why I still c...

   Linux,Emacs,Editor,Advantage,IDE     2012-02-20 05:30:41

  Build route graph of Hurricane Sandy

Hurricane Sandy swept US east side and landed in New York, it killed 113 persons and incurred 50 billion US dollars economic loss. Sandy is also considered as the most expensive hurricane. We will now use matplotlib and basemap libraries in Python to build a route graph of Sandy. Below is the animated GIF. Shadow is added in the graph to show the time at night, we can see from the graph that Sandy stayed a while in Panama after emerging, then it went through Cuba and became Hurricane-2. Late...

   Hurricane Sandy,Route graph,Python     2012-11-17 07:58:13

  Programming language choices for an IT manager

A TechRepublic reader named Aaron emailed me and posed excellent questions; here’s an excerpt from his email:“I manage a small IT department and all my skills are self-taught. At times I struggle with complex business initiatives and I believe if I had some programming skills I would be more adept at handling the initiatives. Can you recommend a programming language? Is formal education the best path or have you found that programming can be self-taught?”I’m sure a lot ...

   IT Manager,Programming,Skills,Programming knowledge     2011-10-21 08:37:10

  JavaScript delete specific item from array

Deleting an item from an array is easy using JavaScript’s built-in method splice(). However, if you are somewhat new to scripting, simply knowing about splice does not help you remove a certain item from an array. This article will solidly state the solution to this dilemma.If you want to remove a specific item from your array, you will simply use a basic loop and a conditional check with the splice()method.Here is a breakdown of what we will do in 3 easy steps, so tha...

   JavaScript,Array,Remove item,Splice,Dele     2011-09-16 16:38:52

  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

  Who Uses PhoneGap/Apache Cordova?

The HTML5 Microzone is presented by DZone and Microsoft to bring you the most interesting and relevant content on emerging web standards.  Experience all that the HTML5 Microzone has to offer on our homepage and check out the cutting edge web development tutorials on Script Junkie, Build My Pinned Site, and the HTML5 DevCenter. I see questions and comments all the time with the general sentiment “it looks nice, but who really uses PhoneGap/Apach...

   PhoneGap,Apache,App,HTML5     2012-03-30 06:30:33

  Learn from Haskell - Functional, Reusable JavaScript

Learn You a Haskell: For Great Good? For the last couple months I have been learning Haskell. Because there are so many unfamiliar concepts, it feels like learning to program all over again. At i.TV, we write a lot of JavaScript (node.js and front end). While many functional/haskell paradigms don’t translate, there are a few techniques that JS can benefit from. There are Haskell library functions for everything. At first I thought this was just because it was mature, but then I notice...

   JavaScript,Haskell,Functional,Reusability,Feature     2012-02-21 05:30:51

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