I am the author of the quote in the question, which came from a previous answer. Jason is right to be suspicious of brief statements such as mine, and to ask for an explanation. Of course, if I fully explained everything in that answer, I would need to have written a book. Mike is also … Read more
Anti-patterns are certain patterns in software development that are considered bad programming practices. As opposed to design patterns which are common approaches to common problems which have been formalized and are generally considered a good development practice, anti-patterns are the opposite and are undesirable. For example, in object-oriented programming, the idea is to separate the … Read more
It’s OK for small applications and allegedly “one-off” scripts, especially with the vars enhancement mentioned by @kaizer.se and the .format version mentioned by @RedGlyph. However, for large applications with a long maintenance life and many maintainers this practice can lead to maintenance headaches, and I think that’s where @S.Lott’s answer is coming from. Let me … Read more
Second Class Citizens – test code isn’t as well refactored as production code, containing a lot of duplicated code, making it hard to maintain tests.
The shell (and basically every programming language which is above assembly language) already knows how to loop over the lines in a file; it does not need to know how many lines there will be to fetch the next one — strikingly, in your example, sed already does this, so if the shell couldn’t do … Read more
Take a look at onBeforeUnload. It wont force someone to stay but it will prompt them asking them whether they really want to leave, which is probably the best cross browser solution you can manage. (Similar to this site if you attempt to leave mid-answer.) <script language=”JavaScript”> window.onbeforeunload = confirmExit; function confirmExit() { return “You … Read more
There is nothing wrong in concatenating two strings with +. Indeed it’s easier to read than ”.join([a, b]). You are right though that concatenating more than 2 strings with + is an O(n^2) operation (compared to O(n) for join) and thus becomes inefficient. However this has not to do with using a loop. Even a … Read more
I’ll make my point very clear: a singleton with parameters is not a singleton. A singleton, by definition, is an object you want to be instantiated no more than once. If you are trying to feed parameters to the constructor, what is the point of the singleton? You have two options. If you want your … Read more
Some projects have all data twice. Once as domain objects, and once as data transfer objects. This duplication has a huge cost, so the architecture needs to get a huge benefit from this separation to be worth it.
I am consistently disappointed by most programmers’ tendency to mix their UI-logic in the data access layer: SELECT FirstName + ‘ ‘ + LastName as “Full Name”, case UserRole when 2 then “Admin” when 1 then “Moderator” else “User” end as “User’s Role”, case SignedIn when 0 then “Logged in” else “Logged out” end as … Read more