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  Can Your Programming Language Do This?

One day, you're browsing through your code, and you notice two big blocks that look almost exactly the same. In fact, they're exactly the same, except that one block refers to "Spaghetti" and one block refers to "Chocolate Moose." // A trivial example: alert("I'd like some Spaghetti!"); alert("I'd like some Chocolate Moose!"); These examples happen to be in JavaScript, but even if you don't know JavaScript, you should be able to follow along. The repeated code looks wrong, ...

   Programming,Maintainability,Reusable     2011-05-31 07:42:41

  Lasagna Code

Anyone who claims to be even remotely versed in computer science knows what “spaghetti code” is. That type of code still sadly exists. But today we also have, for lack of a better term — and sticking to the pasta metaphor — “lasagna code”.Lasagna Code is layer upon layer of abstractions, objects and other meaningless misdirections that result in bloated, hard to maintain code all in the name of “clarity”. It drives me nuts to see how badly some c...

   Lasagna Code,Analysis,spaghetti code     2011-11-16 03:12:03

  The worst program I ever worked on

Most contract jobs fade pretty quickly in memory after the work is done, but some you remember for the rest of your life. This is one of the latter variety. This happened long ago, at a (fair sized) company that shall remain nameless. The software was a chunk of code that had been maintained by a single guy that had been fired recently and was a core component of a commercial system. So far nothing unusual, companies tend to find out that they have a piece of critical knowledge in one head all ...

   Program,worst     2011-03-17 13:58:36

  Sass Style Guide: A Sass Tutorial on How to Write Better CSS Code

Writing consistent and readable CSS that will scale well is a challenging process. Especially when the style sheets are getting larger, more complex, and harder to maintain. One of the tools available to developers to write better CSS are preprocessors. A preprocessor is a program that takes one type of data and converts it to another type of data, and in our case CSS preprocessors are preprocessing languages which are compiled to CSS. There are many CSS preprocessors that front-end develop...

   CSS,SASS,TUTORIAL     2015-09-17 06:40:47

  One of the Best Bits of Programming Advice I ever Got

Years ago (early 1992), I attached myself to this crazy skunkworks project that was using this weird language called Smalltalk. "Object Oriented" was in its infancy as a "hot" item. High paid consultants. Lots of people laying claim to what this new object religion was all about. This was 5 years before Alan Kay would make the statement "I invented the term 'Object Oriented Programming' and this {Java and C++} is not what I had in mind."Shortly after hooking up with this whacky group with t...

   Programming advice,OOP,Smalltalk,Better design     2011-11-28 03:14:25

  Why PHP Was a Ghetto

Note: I wrote this over a month ago, but decided not to publish it until now.I was talking with the Co-founder of a pretty cool start-up in DUMBO the other day about why the non-PHP development world generally has such disdain for PHP and the community surrounding it. He brought up an interesting point that stuck with me, largely because I hadn’t heard it before.If you’re unaware of the usual beef most developers have with PHP, it tends to revolve around:Ug...

   PHP,Framework,MVC     2011-05-06 00:35:37

  <=> operator in MySQL

Have you ever seen "<=>" in a SQL query while using MySQL? Does it mean less and equals to and greater than? Actually if you consider it as the union of <= and =>, great, you are close to it. This is one form of equal operator in MySQL, it has the similar meaning to the = operator with some subtle difference. According to MySQL documentation, <=> is NULL-safe equal. This operator performs an equality comparison like the = operator, but returns 1 rather than NULL if both operand...

   MySQL,NULL safe,<=>     2014-03-24 06:23:22

  A Perl Regular Expression That Matches Prime Numbers

perl -lne '(1x$_) =~ /^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/ || print "$_ is prime"' Can you figure out how it works? I give an explanation below, but try to figure it out yourself. Here is what happens when you run it: $ perl -lne '(1x$_) =~ /^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/ || print "$_ is prime"' 1 2 2 is prime 3 3 is prime 4 5 5 is prime 6 7 7 is prime 8 9 10 11 11 is prime Here is how it works. First, the number is converted in its unary representation by (1x$_). For example, the number 5 gets converted into 1x5, which is ...

   Perl,Regex,Regular expression,Prime number,One line     2011-12-26 08:42:00

  C/C++ Pointer Declaration Syntax – It makes sense!

I never really liked the way pointers are declared in C/C++: int *a, *b, *c; // a, b and c are pointers to int The reason is that I am used to reading variable declarations as MyType myVar1, myVar2, myVar3; and I always read “int*” as the type “integer pointer”. I therefore wanted the following int* a, b, c; // a is a pointer to int, b and c are ints to mean that a, b and c all were of type int*, i.e. pointers to int. and I therefore found it slightly a...

   C,Pointer,Declaration,Attempt     2012-02-22 05:43:58

  Paint messages will come in as fast as you let them

There is a class of messages which are generated on demand rather than explicitly posted into a message queue. If you call Get­Message or Peek­Message and the queue is empty, then the window manager will look to see if one of these generated-on-demand messages is due, messages like WM_TIMER, WM_MOUSE­MOVE, and WM_PAINT. Neil wonders, "In that program that called Invalidate­Rect 100,000 times, how many paint messages were generated?" The Zen answer to this question is "Yes." A ...

   WM_PAINT,paint message,work,Mouse move     2011-12-21 09:37:14

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