Top new questions this week:

Is a senior programmers advice about always using books a good idea?

I am a junior developer and have only been in the industry for 5 years. At my current company there is a senior let's call him Infestus. Occasionally I am being given opportunity to shine and do …

learning career-development self-improvement

asked by Quillion 38 votes answered by webdad3 70 votes

How necessary is it to follow defensive programming practices for code that will never be made publicly available?

I'm writing a Java implementation of a card game, so I created a special type of Collection I'm calling a Zone. All modification methods of Java's Collection are unsupported, but there's a method in …

java data-structures api-design

asked by codebreaker 29 votes answered by Michael K 49 votes

How far should we rename code and data when end users nomenclatures change?

A long time ago we added a feature where our users could "Accept" an image after it was added to a workflow queue. Turns out, we used the wrong term, and users actually "Approve" the image. Changing …

refactoring domain-driven-design

asked by inerte 27 votes answered by Ozz 15 votes

What is the real responsibility of a class?

I keep wondering if it is legitimate to use verbs that are based on nouns in OOP. I came across this brilliant article, though I still disagree with the point it makes. To explain the problem a bit …

object-oriented solid single-responsibility

asked by Arlaud Pierre 20 votes answered by Jörg W Mittag 21 votes

How to best protect from 0 passed to std::string parameters?

I have just realized something disturbing. Every time I have written a method that accepts a std::string as a paramater, I have opened up myself to undefined behaviour. For example, this... void …

c++

asked by John Fitzpatrick 8 votes answered by Vlad 3 votes

Contract Based Programming vs Unit Test

I am a somewhat defensive programmer and a big fan of Microsofts Code Contracts. Now I cannot always use C# and in most languages the only tool I have is assertions. So I usually end up with code …

testing code-contracts

asked by ronag 8 votes answered by duros 10 votes

Are types erased in Haskell?

Haskell has a notion of “generic functions” that has some apparent similarity with common lisp—having neither experience with Haskell nor with common lisp, I might be very approximative here. This …

haskell type-systems common-lisp

asked by user40989 8 votes answered by Kris 10 votes

Greatest hits from previous weeks:

Why is Clean Code suggesting avoiding protected variables?

Clean Code suggests avoiding protected variables in the "Vertical Distance" section of the "Formatting" chapter: Concepts that are closely related should be kept vertically close to each other. …

code-quality variables clean-code uncle-bob

asked by Matsemann 94 votes answered by Telastyn 172 votes

Why do programming languages, especially C, use curly braces and not square ones?

The definition of "C-Style language" can practically be simplified down to "uses curly braces ({})." Why do we use that particular character (and why not something more reasonable, like [], which …

programming-languages c history syntax

asked by SomeKittens 58 votes answered by MichaelT 76 votes

Can you answer these?

How can we calculate Big-O complexity in Functional & Reactive Programming

I started learning functional programming, I am trying to compare between different algorithms that are written in an imperative, functional , parallel programming and using Collections and Lamda …

c# architecture functional-programming asynchronous-programming

asked by user3047512 2 votes

How to algorithmically add notes to an existing midi file relative to positions of existing notes in python

I have a midi file that I'd like to algorithmically add notes to relative to other notes that already exist in the midi file using python, or if it's easier using a different language I'm open to that …

design algorithms python

asked by user110490 1 vote

Most suitable data structure for in-memory string -> int conversion for variable length strings

My project involves validating and normalising email addresses in this format [userpart]@[domainpart].[tld] After syntactic validation of the address, [tld] is checked to exist, otherwise the …

data-structures

asked by innvo 1 vote