The Whiteboard - 2013-03-04

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Programmers Blog

12:13 AM

Programmers Stack Exchange Blog: What programming concepts I should master to have a deep understanding of my craft?

LachlanB on March 04, 2013

So you’ve been working as a programmer for a couple of years, and you want to become a good programmer. But not just a good programmer, you want to be a GREAT programmer. You want to paint with ALL the colors. Hell, you want to paint with all the dimensions. You want to be the GURU of programming – not just some nerd that’s stuck in corner that knows every namespace in the .NET API and can punch out a website in a day – you want to be a Michelangelo. A Picasso. Programming isn’t a science, it’s an art. You want to be respected. …

2 hours later…

user20683

1:52 AM

@MichaelT I did what I could to help, even asked over on UX but they are concerned with design.

5:34 AM

that "disabled keyboard" question would have to be passed through a bold Atwood's transform to something like "how do I tell / pick" - so that mods / community would have at least formal reason to delete spammy answers it could attract...

...then it could possibly migrate to Workplace, preferably with added "looking for long explanation notice" - again, to gie community members a tool to justify flagging spammy / low effort recommendation/poll style answers...

...after that, answer provided by @MichaelT at meta P.SE would make a nice fit there I think "ergonomics specialists were not just random people... etc"

user20683

@gnat yeah I did what I could with it. It's kind of a unique case.

6:07 AM

@WorldEngineer well unique is the amount of effort you put trying to find the place for this question. It was your push that got my brain rolling into this direction, too. As for the question, it's hardly unique...

...regular shopping, combined with OP strong desire to keep it open (which is not particularly frequent, but hardly unique). I guess Jeff wrote his article (Q&A is Hard, Let’s Go Shopping!) based on thousands questions and complaints like this :)

7:04 AM

Hi, sorry for the stupid question ... is this some real-time chat or is this only used to discuss questions from the programmer site further?

@soc Hi, this is real time chat. Technically this is the main room for Programmers, so conversations in here are generally expected to be about the site, its community and its content, but we often talk about other things as well.

ah ok thanks

i'm considering creating a question along the lines of "if you would design a standard library for a general purpose programming language, which data structures would you implement?"

@soc That's... not really a question, that's a poll. We generally expect questions to be about specific software development problems.

but i'm not that sure how to word it properly ... e. g. i'm not interested in some "CS 101" like answers or something like "arrays and singly-linked lists because they are fundamental"

i'm looking for things in the sense of "you need
a) a sequential data structure, I'd use a persistent bit-mapped vector trie
b) an associative data structure, try an AVL tree
c) a priority queue, consider a van-emde-boa-tree or its derivatives
"

@YannisRizos do you have an opinion how this can be transformed into a decent question?

i have looked into the FAQ and a question where different answers are possible is allowed in general

7:24 AM

@soc Subjective questions are allowed in general, but they still have to be about specific practical problems. Polls and open ended questions do not really work with the Q&A format of the site, see the "don't ask" section of the FAQ.

i don't see how it is not a specific, practical problem

@soc It's a hypothetical. That's explicitly off topic (again, see the "don't ask" section). And even if it wasn't a hypothetical, it's a poll. All you'll get is opinions, and this is not what the site is about.

ok, thanks, then i'll ask somewhere else

6 hours later…

user58869

1:31 PM

@soc where did you ask it?

5:01 PM

election closes tomorrow, don't miss the chance to use your votes to influence how site is run...

programmers.stackexchange.com/election

@gnat oh nonsense, it's a sham! All the candidates are the same, it's just a question of who you think is least evil, unless you want to go with the 3rd party candidate, then you're just throwing your vote away!

2 hours later…

user20683

7:14 PM

@soc it'd depend on the kind of language you wanted to create.

user20683

Lua for instance is very minimalist while Python takes a more batteries included approach and PHP just kind of assimilates everything and then sorts it out when @YannisRizos holds a knife to its throat and tells it to give him money.

user20683

the last bit is a joke

user55340

I generally find that 'but php has it' is a good reason not to include it in another language.

user20683

@MichaelT yeah...

user20683

there's the argument about humanistic vs minimal interfaces

user20683

7:18 PM

I think that mostly sums things up in terms of design

user20683

I still need to find a good book on API design though

Mar 1 at 7:01, by Yannis Rizos

The Little Manual of API Design - Just started reading this, so far it makes sense.

user20683

@YannisRizos I need to do a massive list of resources, stuff it on the blog and feed it to people who are naive enough to ask for it

user55340

SO mod primary begins in 37 min.

user20683

@MichaelT well I know three of the 10 I need to push

user20683

7:26 PM

3^3 mod candidates...that's kind of fitting

user55340

I'm waiting for Math.SE to have 3↑3 nominations, since they would be the only ones to be able to figure out what that really means.

user20683

it' like 3 ^ (3^3) 3s

user20683

IIRC

user41796

Oy, that was a long slog. In case anyone cares to read my thoughts on Robert Harvey's thought provoking meta question, here's my answer

user20683

@GlenH7 As far as your bottom 3 bits, I think I can help with that

user20683

7:35 PM

or rather the blog can be the place to put that stuff

@GlenH7 tl;dr

user41796

@YannisRizos - Would you clarify your comment on the web development question. I can't tell if you're saying that work hurt you or hasn't affected you.

user41796

And yes, it's long. But I (obviously) felt it was necessary.

@GlenH7 I spend about a year building adult oriented websites. That year isn't in my resume.

user41796

Got it, that makes sense now. I could have seen that experience going either way for you. Every culture is a bit different.

7:41 PM

I don't really have any issue with it, it's just easier to explain a gap ("sabbatical") than some of the urls of the sites I've build that year...

user41796

true. it's one I would put a fair amount of spin on before I would feel comfortable listing on a resume.

Fairly challenging work though, streaming media in 2005 was... chaotic.

user41796

one of the comments / answers said it better but it's a shame that industry has that stigma since the technical work can be quite challenging and innovative.

user41796

@WorldEngineer - I'm not sure the blog is the right place for those types of questions. The value of a canonical question is that others can vote and edit. So the question takes on a life of it's own as new material comes out. I didn't address the challenges associated with getting new(er) books appropriately ranked as they'll be buried to a degree.

user41796

The other aspect is that a CW question enables collaboration by many. I don't think that one or two folk could create a blog entry that would have the same impact as a CW question on pros / cons / market acceptance / ease of understanding / etc... of programming languages.

user55340

7:54 PM

There are times when reading the various comments about CS vs Programmers... I half wish one could say "we're just going to turn off P.SE for a week, migrate/ask everything you would to P.SE to CS.SE instead" and see how they like it.

user41796

@MichaelT - I actively chose to sidestep that whole issue. Addressing it any more than that would have defeated the purpose of my answer. It can be tempting to sling mud back, but .... not very productive.

@YannisRizos an old colleague of mine spoke at length of a friend he had making a killing as a media streaming/codec master working for a company that did all that stuff. As he said, it's a surprisingly difficult business domain because of the traffic and resource requirements

nice linke for the API manual, looking at it now..

user55340

@GlenH7 I saw that sidestep... Just a wish of "you don't realize that it is over here." I would welcome any CS.SE types to visit and flag everything that they think should be migrated to their site for a week and see what percent it is... we've been more than happy to migrate borderline questions when they said they'd take them.

user41796

@MichaelT - exactly

user55340

8:17 PM

Only 7 cast against Andrew and 9 cast against ChrisF in the primary so far. The ratio of + to - is interesting to look at.

user41796

One thing I dislike about not being active on other sites is that I can't see the vote splits.

@GlenH7 Those 0 voted candidates are actually negatively voted.\

user55340

Another good answer or question or two on SO and you'll be able to see.

Can we see the vote counts for those in our election?

@JimmyHoffa Tomorrow

8:22 PM

@YannisRizos that api design manual is awesome, thanks for sharing. It formalizes a hand full of things that you kind of grope towards a lot of the time

@JimmyHoffa Voting hasn't started on SO yet. They had more than 10 candidates, so this is the primary. The 10 top candidates will advance to the actual election. We didn't have a primary, we went straight to election.

user55340

Decimalists... it should have been 8 candidates.

user41796

@MichaelT - I need to look up how to ignore tags so I can narrow what I see of SO. As it is, the site is simply too much churn. From what I've seen, many questions only get a single response and voting appears to be more frugal there. It's not as interesting to me since "a answer" generally doesn't let you identify the "best answer."

8:45 PM

21,013 rep - Time to randomly downvote an answer to get an awesome palindromic rep.

user55340

@YannisRizos I hear ya... 4748.

user image

@MichaelT You'll find a lot of answers to downvote in the last page of this search: programmers.stackexchange.com/…

user55340

user image

user55340

Yep.. lots of answers to downvote there...

@MichaelT Lowest voted accepted answer network wide (excluding MSO)

user55340

8:54 PM

@YannisRizos I was more joking about the number of results on the page being 1.

user55340

data.stackexchange.com/programmers/query/83094/…

user55340

Impressive.

user41796

9:40 PM

Interesting to see that the results of the data.SE query don't match the query Yannis linked.

user55340

Data.SE isn't realtime.

user41796

And I have (re)discovered why I didn't put my name in for moderator. While strolling through some of the heavily down-voted answers, I felt compelled to obliterate irrelevant comments. I could see my afternoon disappearing before my eyes. OTOH, I could start chasing gnat's flagging record.....

user55340

Alas, I'm only at 140.

user41796

9:57 PM

I'm at a mere 152 flags. Perhaps we should find out when the current mods are going to "disappear" in order to haze the new mod. Then we could collectively open up a bazillion flags on comments. My thinking is that the mods shouldn't get to have all the fun breaking the new person in.

user55340

@GlenH7 Good point... Find some good "not an answers" in the old questions too and save 'em up.

@GlenH7 Comment flags would be perfect for hazing the new guy. They don't show up in our flag handling counts, they are all work without any credit.

user41796

< cue evil, maniacal laughter >

user55340

Now for something completely different...
Algorithm problem. I want to take an 8x8 grid and break it up into 8 sections of 8 contiguous cells. How does one go about doing that (I've thought about it on and off over the years and haven't come up with a good approach).

user55340

The game itself is described at everything2.com/title/Octo - its something I read about long ago (the post on everything2 was in '00), but now its the only instance of the game documentation I can find.

user55340

10:10 PM

  ABCDEFGH
 +--------+
1|ggggfffh|1
2|dddggefh|2
3|dadgeefh|3
4|aadgeffh|4
5|addeefch|5
6|aaabeech|6
7|babbbcch|7
8|bbbcccch|8
 +--------+
  ABCDEFGH

user20683

@MichaelT it's a variant of knapsack looks like

user55340

How do you figure that?

user41796

@MichaelT - sounds like something squarely in the land of computer science theory.

user20683

@GlenH7 @MichaelT It's basically tetris but generalized to 8 rather than 4, so it's gonna be NP-Complete because Tetris is NP-Complete

user55340

Yep... I've tried area analysis with backtracking... (if you cordon off an area, check to see if you can fill it with remaining + n*8. If you can't (you cordon off an area of size 3 but only have 2 left in the set, backtrack)

user55340

10:13 PM

I have no doubt that this is well in the domain of NP.

user55340

Ultimately, I want the program to create a random board and then I try to solve it.

user20683

@MichaelT It'd be an interesting problem to try and murder with CUDA or OpenCL

user55340

The game is "name a rectangle" and get back the count of areas. So "A1 : C2" would return "3 from g, 3 from d" in that above grid. Then you try to figure where everything falls into place.

user55340

If you where to call "A7 : B8" you would get back "3 from b, 1 from a" which would then let you firmly place a 'b' in A8... that's the type of problem solving the game would entail.

user20683

10:32 PM

@MichaelT so it's a bit like minesweeper

user55340

10:44 PM

@WorldEngineer You could think of it that way... its a pen and paper game originally and thus considered to be part of the Battleship family of games.

user55340

10:55 PM

A cow-orker of mine was suggesting a simulated annealing approach to the octo problem...

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