Chris_Newton

141 ms·

961.
by Chris_Newton 16y ago
That's a fair point, but unfortunately in C++ the various types of polymorphism often do not play nicely together. Look at any on-line forums discussing C++. If you're a bit more cynical, look at a list of tricky C++ interview questions ins
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by Chris_Newton 16y ago
I'm all for evidence-based debate, but as I don't have that particular book, could you please provide specific citations? I am willing to accept that I am wrong if the evidence really says I am, but I remain deeply suspicious of these concl
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by Chris_Newton 16y ago
> There is a productivity valley between small teams (up to 5-8 people) and large teams (20+). Sorry, but I don't agree with that at all. As soon as you have more than one person working on the same part of your code, you incur some deg
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by Chris_Newton 16y ago
> Any language which adds additional mechanisms to make my life easier as a developer is a good thing. What if they make life easier for you but harder for everyone else on your team? I'm not saying I disagree with your philosophy, just
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by Chris_Newton 16y ago
A more declarative programming style has many potential benefits. The trouble is, the version in that style is supposed to look something like this: total dice = sum (map faceValue dice) C++ is showing its age now, as ideas from ot
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by Chris_Newton 16y ago
Because if you don't know what you're building, you aren't really following a process at all, you're just experimenting randomly and hoping something good happens. Personally, I advocate relying on thinking things through and solving real p
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by Chris_Newton 16y ago
1. Top-level requirements: What problem or problems is this application going to solve, and for whom? If you can't answer these questions clearly, you aren't building a serious application, you're just playing around. (This does not mean
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by Chris_Newton 17y ago
It is certainly possible to communicate between Java applets and JavaScript, and in a widely portable way. One of my current projects does it all the time, for much the reason you suggest: it means I can have the model in a well-structured
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by Chris_Newton 17y ago
"There's nothing unusual in that agreement. It sounds like every other social network." I don't use any other social network, and this is one of the reasons why. I have now deleted my profile on LinkedIn, which is a shame as I had a nice re
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by Chris_Newton 17y ago
I'm certainly not advocating complete uniformity in how everyone does everything, but I think we have to be careful about judging programming style based on artificial limitations. Static code navigation, on the level of your examples, is e
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by Chris_Newton 17y ago
I'd suggest that the important thing is not how many lines a function has, but whether it represents a single, cohesive idea. Haskell functions aren't shorter because someone decided one day that they should be, they are shorter because Has
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by Chris_Newton 17y ago
> The question becomes: when does hiding complexity improve your ability to reason about the code? How about this: "when the degree of complexity hidden is greater than the extra complexity introduced by the abstraction mechanism"? Edit
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by Chris_Newton 17y ago
We are far too willing to dismiss things as mere "personal preference" in this industry. There may be competing theories all supported by some empirical evidence and sound logic, but some claims are directly contradicted by hard data. Those
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by Chris_Newton 17y ago
I quite like the way Lehman put it in his Law of Continuing Change: "A program that is used and that as an implementation of its specification reflects some other reality, undergoes continual change or becomes progressively less useful." Si
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by Chris_Newton 17y ago
I had some similar lightbulb moments when I started investigating the psychology of reading code. When you have some idea of how people with different needs and different experience read and understand code, you start to think about those f
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by Chris_Newton 17y ago
That's all true, but unfortunately it doesn't help. You can still have two indices greater than half the maximum value of a size_t, and cause an overflow. The problem here isn't the maximum value of whatever data type we are using, it is th