Top new questions this week:

Is it OK to split long functions and methods into smaller ones even though they won't be called by anything else?

Lately I've been trying to split long methods into several short ones. For example: I have a process_url() function which splits URLs into components and then assigns them to some objects via their …

readability functions methods

asked by exizt 74 votes answered by MichaelT 111 votes

Refusing to review code

I am in a position where I have been asked to review some code that fixes a problem that I don't believe exists. The fixer, who is more senior than me, insists his fix is necessary but it appears …

code-reviews

asked by James 50 votes answered by Craig 194 votes

Coding style (do more, then simplify)

I'm a CS student and I have been coding for a few months shy of a year now, and I seem to have developed what I think may be a "bad" habit and I'm wondering if anyone does the same (or whether it's a …

coding-style

asked by George Greg 34 votes answered by LachlanB 41 votes

Testing multi-threaded race conditions

Reading the comments to this answer, specifically: Just because you can't write a test doesn't mean it's not broken. Undefined behaviour which usually happens to work as expected (C and C++ are …

testing multithreading

asked by Dan Neely 18 votes answered by John R. Strohm 32 votes

Is the algorithm more important than the programming language?

During the current (2013) Google Code Jam contest, there was a problem that took C++ and Java people 200+ lines of code as compared to Python people that solved the same problem only using 40 lines of …

java c++ algorithms python competition

asked by superspacemarines 17 votes answered by Frank 47 votes

What should I do when waiting for a review?

Before asking my question, I must explain the situation. I'm working for a company as a junior software engineer. One of the seniors always stops me when I finished my development and wanted to …

teamwork code-reviews

asked by blank 11 votes answered by Doc Brown 15 votes

How did they debug segmentation faults before protected memory?

Now, when I make a programming mistake with pointers in C, I get a nice segmentation fault, my program crashes and the debugger can even tell me where it went wrong. How did they do that in the time …

history debugging memory

asked by Bart Friederichs 10 votes answered by Ross Patterson 20 votes

Greatest hits from previous weeks:

Why shouldn't I use the repository pattern with Entity Framework?

During a job interview, I was asked to explain why the repository pattern isn't a good pattern to work with ORMs like Entity Framework. Why is this the case?

asp.net-mvc unit-of-work

asked by StringBuilder 17 votes answered by Shyju 15 votes

I've inherited 200K lines of spaghetti code -- what now?

I hope this isn't too general of a question; I could really use some seasoned advice. I am newly employed as the sole "SW Engineer" in a fairly small shop of scientists who have spent the last 10-20 …

project-management agile development-process maintenance life-cycle

asked by kmote 366 votes answered by haylem 365 votes

Can you answer these?

Algorithm/Strategy or Data structure to capture priorities sub priorities in an app

I am working on a CMS that is starting to evolve a bit. We started off with content that had the following priorities ( columnn in the db on the content table): HIGH MED LOW. Data was fetched by …

algorithms data-structures data-modeling

asked by RidingRails 1 vote

COM Interop & DI : Where to bind?

Recently I have "discovered" the virtues of dependency injection and I absolutely love the way it has affected my code - all the pieces are simple, focused and decoupled; I can now mock all the …

c# libraries dependency-injection

asked by retailcoder 1 vote

How to create in Python Tkinter a widget that would act like a choice tree?

I would like to know if there is such widget in tk (or in any different standard Python 3 module), or how to create it: Of course it doesn't have to look like this, but it should offer same …

python gui

asked by Misery 1 vote