Complexity deals with various forms of calculating the complexity of code. Cyclomatic complexity, n-path complexity, Big O time and space complexity.
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What's wrong with comments that explain complex code?
A lot of people claim that "comments should explain 'why', but not 'how'". Others say that "code should be self-documenting" and comments should be scarce. Robert C. Martin claims that (rephrased to ...
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How to explain why multi-threading is difficult
I am a fairly good programmer, my boss is also a fairly good programmer. Though he seems to underestimate some tasks such as multi-threading and how difficult it can be (I find it very difficult for ...
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How to manage accidental complexity in software projects
When Murray Gell-Mann was asked how Richard Feynman managed to solve so many hard problems Gell-Mann responded that Feynman had an algorithm:
Write down the problem.
Think real hard.
Write down the ...
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Why aren't there code overviews for open-source projects? [closed]
There are very complex open source projects out there, and to some of them I think I could make some contributions, and I wish I could, but the barrier to entry is too high for a single reason: for ...
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Is big-O really that relevant when working in industry?
In every interview I have been in, I have been quizzed on mathematical analysis of complexity, including big-O notation.
How relevant is big-O analysis to development in industry? How often do you ...
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Can too much abstraction be bad?
As programmers I feel that our goal is to provide good abstractions on the given domain model and business logic. But where should this abstraction stop? How to make the trade-off between abstraction ...
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When is it NOT good to use actors in akka/erlang?
I've been working with akka for 7-8 months now daily.
When I started, I would be working on applications and notice that actors would be used basically anywhere once inside the actor system for ...
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Is it possible to reach absolute zero bug state for large scale software?
I am talking about 20-30+ millions lines of code, software at the scale and complexity of Autodesk Maya for example.
If you freeze the development as long as it needs to be, can you actually fix all ...
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Adding complexity to remove duplicate code
I have several classes that all inherit from a generic base class. The base class contains a collection of several objects of type T.
Each child class needs to be able to calculate interpolated ...
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Adding complexity by generalising: how far should you go? [duplicate]
Reference question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4303813/help-with-interview-question
The above question asked to solve a problem for an NxN matrix. While there was an easy solution, I gave a ...
18
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3answers
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Is there a correlation between complexity and reachability?
I've been studying cyclomatic complexity (McCabe) and reachability of software at uni recently. Today my lecturer said that there's no correlation between the two metrics, but is this really the case?
...
17
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Is Object Oriented Programming a solution to complexity? [closed]
Do you think Object Oriented Programming is a solution to complexity. Why? This topic may be a bit controversial but my intentions to know the answer of Why from the experts here !
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How does one rein in the complexities of web development? [closed]
I have been a server-side programmer for most of my career and have only recently started spending more time on web development. I am amazed at the number of things I need to master in order to write ...
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What is O in Big O?
What is Big and O in Big O notation? I've read the definitions and it doesn't tell what is O pronounced as 'oh'. For example - I understand that O(n) is complexity of a linear algorithm where n could ...
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Do else blocks increase code complexity? [closed]
Here is a very simplified example. This isn't necessarily a language-specific question, and I ask that you ignore the many other ways the function can be written, and changes that can be made to it.. ...
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4answers
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Are Constant Time and Amortized Constant Time effectively considered equivalent?
I need to write a RandomQueue that allows for appends and random removal in Constant Time ( O(1) ).
My first thought was to back it with some kind of Array (I chose an ArrayList), since arrays have ...
14
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8answers
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When should complexity be removed?
Prematurely introducing complexity by implementing design patterns before they are needed is not good practice.
But if you follow all (or even most of) the SOLID principles and use common design ...
13
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6answers
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Determining if an Algorithm is O (log n)
I'm refreshing my CS Theory, and I want to know how to identify that an algorithm O (log n) complexity. Specifically, is there an easy way to identify it?
I know with O(n), you usually have a single ...
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5answers
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What would be the Impact of P=NP? [closed]
I am preparing for a test and I can't find a clear answer on the question: What would be the impact of proving that PTIME=NPTIME. I checked wikipedia and it just mentioned that it would have "profound ...
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1answer
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Is Domain Driven Design useful / productive for not so complex domains?
When assessing a potential project at work, I suggested that it might be advantageous to use a domain driven design approach to its object model. The project does not have an excessively complex ...
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How do you manage a complexity jump?
It seems an infrequent but common experience that sometimes you're working on a project and suddenly something turns up unexpectedly, throws a massive spanner in the works and ramps up the complexity ...
12
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1answer
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Computational Complexity of Correlation in Time vs Multiplication in Frequency space
I am working with 2d correlation for image processing techniques (pattern recognition etc...). I was wondering if there is a theoretical approach on how to tell when to use multiplication in frequency ...
11
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3answers
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Do teams get more productive by adding more developers? [duplicate]
Suppose you've got a project that is running late. Is there any proof or argument that teams become much more productive by adding more people? I am looking for answers that can be supported by facts ...
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How long and what type of complexity would have been involved in Chris Sawyer writing most of rollercoaster tycoon in assembler?
From this question, I have another question about...
How long and what type of complexity would have been involved in Chris Sawyer writing most of rollercoaster tycoon in assembler?
In order to ...
10
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5answers
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Is the concept of computational complexity important for software developers? [closed]
I was under the impression that the concepts of time and memory complexity are a must for graduates of compsci courses, but having studied engineering I have no knowledge if that is the case. I have ...
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Guidance in naming awkward domain-specific objects?
I'm modeling a chemical system, and I'm having problems with naming my elements / items within an enum.
I'm not sure if I should use:
the atomic formula
the chemical name
an abbreviated chemical ...
10
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2answers
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Is there a correlation between code complexity and developer productivity?
Is the time spent refactoring a code base worth it in the long run, in terms of developer productivity?
It seems pretty clear to me that modifying a clean, well designed system is much simpler and ...
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2answers
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What does it mean by expected running time and average runnnig time of an algorithm?
Let's say we want to analyze running time of algorithms. Sometimes we say that we want to find the running time of an algorithm when the input size is n and for the worst possible case it is denote it ...
10
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2answers
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Dealing with Feature Intersections
I have recently witnessed more and more problems similar to the ones explained in this article on feature intersections. Another term for it would be product lines, though I tend to attribute these to ...
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4answers
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Reducing the complexity of a class
I have looked at some answers and searched on Google, but I could not find anything helpful (i.e., that wouldn't have awkward side effects).
My problem, in abstract, is that I have an object and need ...
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How to differentiate between trivial and non-trivial software?
So what really makes a program trivial?
'Unless its trivial software' is used so often in programming discussions. I find it very vague in the sense that I can't really figure if 'something is ...
8
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5answers
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How much redundancy/robustness should complex software implement?
The focus of this question: Some software performs "extra work" in order to increase the chance of a "eventually successful/satisfactory" outcome, despite one or more internal errors in the software, ...
8
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1answer
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Subset sum problem is NP-complete?
If I know correctly, subset sum problem is NP-complete. Here you have an array of n integers and you are given a target sum t, you have to return the numbers from the array which can sum up to the ...
8
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2answers
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Should there be a formal role (internal or external) assigned to dev environments to control wasteful complexity?
A few years ago, I worked for a small company that went so far into developing in-house frameworks that they dedicated their most senior developer, and their architect to developing a custom MVC ...
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2answers
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single for-loop runtime explanation problem
I am analyzing some running times of different for-loops, and as I'm getting more knowledge, I'm curious to understand this problem which I have still yet to find out.
I have this exercise called "How ...
7
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3answers
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How to simplify my complex stateful classes and their testing?
I am in a distributed system project written in java where we have some classes which corresponds to very complex real-world-business objects. These objects have a lot of methods corresponding to ...
7
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1answer
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Problems Calculating Big-O Complexity
I'm a complete beginner to Java, only in my second quarter of classes. I'm having trouble understanding our current chapter about calculating big-O for methods. So I thought I was right in saying that ...
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Smallest lexicographical rotation of a string using suffix arrays in O(n)
I will quote the problem from ACM 2003:
Consider a string of length n (1 <= n <= 100000). Determine its minimum lexicographic rotation. For example, the rotations of the string “alabala” ...
6
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4answers
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Good idea to move logic out of SQL statements?
I'll preface this question by saying that I am very new to professional software dev.
I work on a team that takes data in from other groups in my company and turns this data into reports usable by ...
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6answers
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Fields vs method arguments [closed]
I just started writing some new class and it occurred to me that I was adding a lot of method arguments that are not strictly needed. This is following a habit to avoid having state in classes that is ...
6
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3answers
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NP hard/complete
I have never been very clear on this concept. Please help:
At the end of the day, we should want to identify useful problems for which we don't have polynomial solution so far and only have ...
6
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3answers
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Does it make sense to compute cyclomatic complexity/lines of code ratio?
In general, maintainability index relies on many factors. For example, in Visual Studio, it rely on cyclomatic complexity, depth of inheritance, class coupling and lines of code; those four values ...
6
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1answer
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Complexity of a web application
I am currently writing my Master's Thesis on maintainability of a web application. I found some methods like the "Maintainability Index" by Coleman et.al. or the "Software Maintainability Index" by ...
6
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1answer
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How can I compute the Big-O notation for a given piece of code? [closed]
So I just took a data structure midterm today and I was asked to determine the run time, in Big O notation, of the following nested loop:
for (int i = 0; i < n-1; i++) {
for(int j = 0; j < ...
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4answers
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Big-O for nested loop
I am reading this post on Big-O
It says that the following code is O(n^2):
bool ContainsDuplicates(String[] strings)
{
for(int i = 0; i < strings.Length; i++)
{
for(int j = 0; j ...
5
votes
2answers
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Is currying too complex a tool to actually use?
Today I feel like I finally grokked currying (in Javascript), and of course, like any programmer who has learned a new trick, my mind immediately began racing over how to improve my current codebase ...
5
votes
3answers
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Is O(log n) + O(log n) = O(n)? [duplicate]
We know that binary search takes O(log n) in Big O notation but if we need to run twice an algorithm of O(log n), would it be the same as O(n) in time complexity?
For example, if I have a method to ...
5
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4answers
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Conquering Complexity: Valuable techniques
Software development techniques exist to solve problems. I think a key problem we face is conquering complexity. Also, software developers must often classify and understand complex systems, ...
5
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Why don't “multi-infinite” list comprehensions work with lazy evaluation?
As a simple demonstration of the efficiency of Haskell style, I thoughtlessly ran the following:
take 100 [(a, b, c) | a <- [1..], b <- [1..], c <- [1..], a^2 + b^2 == c^2]
This should be a ...
5
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2answers
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Does increasing the number of classes increase code complexity? [duplicate]
To illustrate the question, let's say we have two programmers of comparable skill that both solve the same problem. The code they turn out has roughly the same lines of code, but one programmer uses 5 ...
