Top new questions this week:

Why do some big projects, like Git and Debian, only use a mailing list and not an issue tracker?

Bug tracker for any decent sized project seem like a bit of a no-brainer to me - it makes it really easy to organise hundreds or thousands issues, without issues colliding or getting mixed up. So …

project-management communication issue-tracking email

asked by naught101 33 votes answered by gnat 31 votes

Keep a programming language backwards compatible vs. fixing its flaws

First, some context (stuff that most of you know anyway): Every popular programming language has a clear evolution, most of the time marked by its version: you have Java 5, 6, 7 etc., PHP 5.1, 5.2, …

programming-languages backward-compatibility

asked by Radu Murzea 33 votes answered by Kilian Foth 9 votes

Best practices for sharing tiny snippets of code across projects

I always try to follow the DRY principle strictly at work; every time I've repeated code out of laziness it bites back later when I need to maintain that code in two places. But often I write small …

project-management code-reuse projects-and-solutions dry

asked by George Powell 15 votes answered by p.s.w.g 14 votes

Why is Option/Maybe considered a good idea and checked exceptions are not?

Some programming languages like e.g. Scala have the concept of Option types (also called Maybe), which can either contain a value or not. From what I've read about them they are considered widely to …

exceptions option

asked by Mad Scientist 15 votes answered by Andrea 8 votes

Is the "Gets or sets .." necessary in XML documentation of properties?

I am looking for a recommendation of a best practice for XML comments in C#. When you create a property, it seems like that the expected XML documentation has the following form: /// <summary> …

c# .net programming-practices comments

asked by Tomas 11 votes answered by Mike 21 votes

Would it make sense to use objects (instead of primitive types) for everything in C++?

During a recent project I've been working on, I've had to use a lot of functions that kind of look like this: static bool getGPS(double plane_latitude, double plane_longitude, double plane_altitude, …

c++ type-systems data-types type-safety

asked by zackg 11 votes answered by Cong Xu 17 votes

Best practise is not to poll...but isn't polling happening internally anyway when a thread calls wait()?

Say we have some thread that wants to check when another thread is finished its task. I have read that we should call a wait() type function that will make this thread wait until it receives a …

multithreading parallelism thread locks

asked by csss 8 votes answered by Blrfl 18 votes

Greatest hits from previous weeks:

Why does it matter that HTML and CSS are not programming languages?

Example here: What languages should I know if I'm interested in building web applications ? Yes, I understand that HTML and CSS are not Turing-complete. Yes, I understand that they are declarative, …

terminology

asked by Robert Harvey 102 votes answered by Kramii 185 votes

When to favor webforms over MVC

I know Microsoft has said "MVC is not a replacement for webforms". Some developers say webforms is faster to develop than MVC, but I believe this all comes down to comfort level with the technology; …

asp.net asp.net-mvc-3 webforms

asked by P.Brian.Mackey 37 votes answered by Tyanna 28 votes

Can you answer these?

Handling timeout in network application

How can I handle timeouts in a network application. I'm implementing a provisioning system on a Linux server, the code is huge so I'm going to put the algorithm, it works as like this Read …

c data-structures linux networking

asked by user2175831 1 vote

How does LSA authentication on Windows work?

I'm trying to understand the security protocols on Windows from a high level as part of legal research into cybercrime, and I'm having difficulty figuring out where to focus my research. I've already …

security windows lsa-authentication

asked by ihtkwot 5 votes

Byte code weaving vs Lisp macros

I have been reading about the libraries people have written for languages like Java and C# that make use of byte code weaving to do things like intercept function calls, insert logging code, etc. I …

lisp clojure macros aop

asked by mortalapeman 6 votes