The Whiteboard

Wait if I put @username in a comment, and that user did not post a comment, would he/she get notified?

You can generally tell whether you're going to actually notify someone if you get an intellisense.

I wonder how hard it would be to write a Scheme -> JavaScript compiler in CoffeeScript with my parser combinators library... I could probably do it really easily if I just made a stupid simple scheme and the back-end just translated the S expressions to JavaScript's form..

Right but I didn't get it

so I'm not sure

For instance if I say @RobertHarvey here you get pinged

but if I say @MichaelT

he's not on and I didn't get an intellisense

Was he pinged or not?

user114359

2:11 AM

Is there anybody... out there?

yes

user114359

I have a question brewing in my head but I am having a tough time whipping into something that would make a good question, I could use some help.

user114359

Looks like a piece of software doesn't exist, so I need to implement it myself. The design is proving to be a challenge: softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/10274/…

Lol good luck with that

hey @Snowman

Most of us here are on during the day

so you may have better luck waiting ~12 hours and trying again then :)

for what it's worth, one of the guys in here might know of something that could solve your problem, and we appreciate not asking it on the main site :)

2:26 AM

> we appreciate not asking it on the main site :)

@Snowman What about writing a Linq provider?

@Shahar you know, some people actually read the rules

tou·ché

Snowman isn't a new user

I am

Oh. Not C#.

Doing it Java would probably be a step removed.

2:29 AM

what

@Shahar I have 0 sympathy for you. You blatantly admit to agreeing to the terms without reading them.

user114359

I don't need to ask about the whole thing, just a design review

@Ampt He could have lied about that.

@Ampt Didn't ask for sympathy just explained myself

besides, nobody reads the terms

If I read the terms for every single website I registered to

Yeah, which is why so many people put so much effort into writing them, and the help center.

2:31 AM

@RobertHarvey suppose he could have. Not sure what advantage he would gain by making everyone think that he's one of those users who ask questions we insta-close

I'd still be programming in VB6 today

user114359

some of the terms on most of the SE network are vague and even contradictory

@Snowman not the terms, the FAQ and help center

@Shahar Yeah, no. People were learning new languages long before Stack Overflow, or even the Internet, came along.

You didn't get what I meant

I meant I'd spend days on just reading the terms for each website I registered

so no thanks ^_^

It's a normal thing to do, you just don't want to admit it

2:34 AM

@Snowman so you basically want to just have an easier way to manipulate SQL data?

The FAQ and and help center are not readily accessible to new users. Didn't know we had "metas" until recently

user114359

What I am trying to do is manipulate arbitrary data presented as tuples in a way described by SQL. Envision it as a graphical explain plan

user114359

data sources are ideally decoupled. In this case I have a web service, could be anything though. The important thing is I can retrieve tuples.

user114359

On the other end I have output from JSqlParser: a data structure explaining the structure of the query

user114359

what I need is a design to take the parsed SQL and create objects that represent the actions the query must take to transform tuples from an outside source into what the query is selecting.

user114359

2:37 AM

in other words, a stripped down SQL engine. No storage involved, just the query analyzer/executor.

Hmm...

user114359

I figured there would be some interface for a "query action" where an implementation might represent a join, aggregate, union, etc. and the code would take the parsed SQL and create these action objects, link them together (e.g. union would take two or more other actions and concatenate their tuples), and come up with one "master" action that turns the crank and spits out the results.

user114359

it just has to be functional - I don't need advanced database optimizations like a real RDBMS. And if some esoteric SQL feature cannot be supported that is okay

and you're saying SQL is too slow right?

thats why you need this?

Arrright I'm leaving and I probably won't be on for the next few days

user114359

2:42 AM

in this case there is no SQL engine. I am wrapping a web service with SQL

or maybe not come back

so bye

ah yes, ok

so the desired interface for the web service is SQL

interesting

user114359

we are trying to wrap the Salesforce API in JDBC so we can connect it to other tools like schema mappers and automatically suck data out of it using existing off the shelf components

ugh. SFDC

user114359

everything else works, this is the last piece. And yes I know, I both love and hate that platform

2:44 AM

I've got some buddies at work who may have done something like this, I'll ping them tomorrow

trying to treat SFDC like a database. I like it hahaha

user114359

right now I have code in place to handle basic crud operations and it works with the same limitations as SOQL

user114359

but we want to add joins, aggregates, etc. in the way SQL does

user114359

the quick and dirty code I wrote is not extensible, hence this question

Yeah, I get why you're doing it now

user114359

I like to think of this as a Rube Goldberg contraption. Salesforce is basically Oracle talking to a proprietary Java 5 framework talking to a SOAP layer talking to my SOAP layer talking to a JDBC adapter talking to SquirrelSQL where I actually write the queries.

2:47 AM

I'm not sure if thats hilarious or really, really sad

user114359

or, as I like to think of software with too many layers of abstraction, it is like Shrek. See, ogres, I mean software programs, are like onions. They have layers, and they all make you cry.

you know, I'm thinking you just hire some cheap labor to use the webUI to get all your data out that ay

what do you think?

Great idea, or greatest idea?

user114359

mechanical turk?

only you get to see the workers

and they probably aren't masters of anything

Glen, maybe you have some insight into wrapping a web service with an SQL-like functionality API?

user114359

actually, I have two SEs not currently assigned to a project. I could ask them to execute my queries.

2:50 AM

snowman wants to take SFDC and treat it like a DB

@Snowman I hope I'm not one of those SEs

if I come in tomorrow and have to start running SFDC queries, I'm gonna hunt you down

anyway, I gotta get to sleep. Early day over at the mothership tomorrow. Just come back and re-post your question in 12 hours. probably get more help then

(In here that is)

you'll probably snipe at least a few guys

@Snowman How much data are we talking about, at any given moment?

Does Salesforce actually have some sort of query facility?

user41796

@Shahar Enjoy your time off. From your earlier comments it doesn't sound like you take breaks all too often, so hopefully it will be good for you.

SquirrelSQL?

user41796

@Ampt I'm catching up to this particular conversation, yes

I guess I'm a bit confused. If you already have a query facility, why do you need another one? Or are you trying to skip some layers?

user114359

2:57 AM

it does have a query facility called SOQL, standard object query language

user41796

@RobertHarvey No, I think he's trying to normalize his access into that DB

user114359

it is similar to SQL but very feature-poor. It is designed to give a SQL-like interface to querying what are essentially DAOs

user41796

Another way of putting it is that he has a datastore with a non-standard language (aka not SQL) to access and manipulate the data with. He wants to wrap that non-standard language under the guise of a standard language like SQL.

user41796

@Snowman - did I correctly meta-summarize what you're trying to do?

user114359

correct -- with the caveat that some of the work is already done, there is just one piece I need to replace

user41796

2:59 AM

That "one piece" is often the largest...

user114359

Yep, I saved the biggest for last. I have the JDBC interface, I am using JSqlParser to provide an object view of the query. On the other end I have a Java object which has methods to perform the actual remote queries

user41796

I think most just suck it up and deal with the crappy API, tbh. Wrapping a crappy API with a standard API means you'll have to cripple the standard version so it's compatible with the underlying crap.

user114359

that's kind of how I feel now, this is ridiculously complex. But if there is a way, at least I'm doing it at work and not home

user114359

the specific problem I am trying to solve is modeling a SQL query using objects that work together to pass data between them and transform it at each step

SQLite has a C# version. It's possible you could harvest some parts of that.

user114359

3:02 AM

I hadn't thought of that. The C version is too different to bother, but C# might be close enough

code.google.com/p/csharp-sqlite

that feeling when your alarm clock is currently stuck in a boot loop and you want to go to bed

user41796

@Snowman If C# would get you there more quickly, definitely worth considering. It appears that most people weigh the cost of just dealing with the crappy API versus finding a way to work around it and come to the conclusion that dealing with the crap is easier.

user41796

@Ampt Go old school and get a regular alarm clock already.... Sheesh. You youngins.

I have one, it's just not plugged in

I've gone from having a mildly impaired phone to having one that doesn't boot

user41796

3:06 AM

@Ampt I hear they boot really fast.

user114359

the entire purpose of this exercise is to get around the crappy API

user114359

being able to use standard JDBC tools is how I justify the time I spend at work :-)

@Snowman the entire purpose is to Save time in the future

by paying now and getting a better API

but if you spend more time making it than you will ever save using it

user41796

@Snowman on a more constructive note, @MichaelT is very familiar with Java and what the future versions are bringing. I don't think there's anything in the immediate horizon that would help your predicament, but he would know better.

it's not exactly worth it

user114359

3:07 AM

with Oracle in charge, I think it is easy to see what is in Java's future

I was thinking of calling in @JimmyHoffa to see if haskell could help

Monads solve everything.

user41796

On the flip side, the Salesforce folk know that their API sucks. But if they haven't come up with a better API then that may mean it's not possible. So you may be fighting an impossible battle.

@RobertHarvey Monads got my cat out of a tree.

@GlenH7 They might be locked into backwards compatibility.

user41796

3:09 AM

Exactly

They might not give a F

They see $$$$$$$$$$$$$$

user114359

Salesforce is in a predicament where they keep offering nifty user-visible features while neglecting the stuff developers need to deal with

user114359

if they keep focusing on eye candy and reporting, developers will get fed up and leave. Then there won't be enough people to support the partner community they rely on

user41796

@Ampt They're also resource constrained like any other organization.

user41796

They have to walk a fine line balancing between the requirements of two different domains.

user114359

3:13 AM

I really wish they had taken the Android approach of using an existing language but maybe cutting some of the libraries that aren't needed

user41796

@Snowman Roll yourself back to when they started and the number of qualified available prospects for that drops off quickly.

user114359

they had the resources to create their own Java-lite which translates to Java then compiles anyway, why not just use Java minus the libraries not needed on the server? And when they started there was no coding anyway, it was a config-based CRM product. I forget the name.

user114359

the whole thing smells of overpaid executives chasing some money pie.

user114359

but anyway, I can't do anything about it. but it does pay the bills.

A: Impose a 24 hour voting freeze on questions being discussed on Meta

5:03 AM

@Snowman OData is unacceptable? There's ODBC OData drivers, I would imagine there's JDBC ones too...

@Snowman rssbus.com/jdbc/odata <-- OData JDBC driver. Just create an OData service that either replaces or acts as a facade in front of the actual service. Then all you have to do is implement queryability over the WebService to the OData spec.

Ideally the main web service it's supposed to be in front of could just be converted to serve an OData API

gnat

6:28 AM

since this is tagged feature-request, I eagerly await it to become status-completed. This would look so... lovely against recent decline of The association bonus should not enable users to vote on every site — gnat 14 hours ago

....aaaaand... there we go!

6

I like the intent behind this. It is a problem, I see it too often as I attend to the things folks send through our support email and I've often thought about ways to curtail this behavior that don't make the system any harder to document and explain to someone else than it currently is. As prop...

> Deferring it for now. I'd really like to fix this

why am I not surprised

what about 'mob' activity in hot questions? nothing to worry about there? — gnat 6 mins ago

gnat

7:30 AM

2

Q: Prevent questions on Hot List from being upvoted by casual visitors (only rep is from association bonus)

I have experienced this on a couple of sites (and I'm not the only one) : You look through the question list. You see a pretty bad (or at least not-so-good) question heavily upvoted. Or even worse, a very poor answer to a good question - upvoted to stratosphere. Or even worse, a very poor/inc...

user41796

11:44 AM

Please consider for reopening. Still not necessarily a great question, but it is answerable and the OP did a fairly decent job of re-scoping their question.

user41796

0

Q: What is considered to be a "modification" of sources under the BSD license?

I have a question about the 3-clause BSD license based on it's Wiki description. It states: Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: ... What is understood by "modification"? Specifica...

open-source ethics bsd-license forking attribution

user55340

3:04 PM

@gnat He's got a take 2 on there now...

user55340

3

A: Impose a 24 hour voting freeze on questions being discussed on Meta

New answer, because thinking out loud gets me in trouble. Lets log these first, based on referrer, and take a look at the scope of the problem that we're actually dealing with. Just like we reverse votes when someone finds an answer you wrote, down votes it, then goes through your profile and ...

user55340

I think I've got some fun comments on that one.

user55340

It is also important to consider if the votes are unwarranted Elsewhere it was said "Guess what: if your site is full of crappy questions, your site sucks - even if they're not highly-ranked by your own users, [...]. You can work to fix that - as painful as that process is - or you can bury your head in the sand and blame it on all of those stupid people from elsewhere. [...] Blaming someone else is easy and fun for the whole family - but it doesn't fix anything." — MichaelT 14 mins ago

user55340

You might recognize the source of that quote.

user41796

Now I kinda wish I had 10k on SO so I could see the deleted post too

user41796

3:06 PM

I should stop worrying about racking up more Progs delete votes and work on that SO repz instead.

you know it

user55340

It wasn't that great. He was suggesting a 'remove mob votes from source' interface...

user41796

But the mobs must rule us

user41796

I don't quite get the idiosyncrasy between mob up votes from hot questions is okay but mob down votes from meta effect is bad. It's implying that down votes have a greater penalizing effect than what they do, and that up votes have less importance.

@GlenH7 excessive downvotes can cost someone privileges

though rolling back excessive upvotes can do the same

but then he won't have it for that long

user41796

3:17 PM

@ratchetfreak but excessive upvotes grant undeserved privileges.

@GlenH7 which is less of a problem

user41796

@ratchetfreak That's the point of view that I don't understand.

user41796

Granted, there's a presumption on my part that the privileges would be invoked.

@GlenH7 people are greedy bastards

user41796

This is true...

user41796

3:21 PM

From what I've seen, meta effect tends to hit noobs the hardest. 1 rep and 101 rep users on a site.

The 1 rep users merely get their feelings hurt with heavy down voting because of the rep floor and the fact that future upvotes don't have to pay off those down votes.

The 101 rep users lose a part of their association bonus along with getting their feelings hurt. But part of me says that maybe they didn't deserve that association bonus on that particular site anyway. But I'm likely overestimating what the association bonus was supposed to confer.

user41796

But in the end, it's all unicorn poo so it really doesn't matter.

The association bonus is supposed to be an acknowledgement of experience, that the system trusts them. If a user doesn't really have that, well.

user41796

@RobertHarvey Part of me says ... "hammer 'em" if they're whinging.

user41796

FWIW, retracted my close vote on the threads question. Solid answer you put in there.

Oh, I thought that was Gnat. :P People should never assume about downvotes; they're always wrong.

user55340

3:25 PM

The main bits are the 'remove new user restrictions', 'flag posts', and 'comment everywhere with a hefty bump to 'reduce ads' and other < 500 privs.

user41796

@RobertHarvey There were 2 close votes, one of which was mine. My first read on the question was a big "WUT?" But I read your answer and realized that the question was okay. Not great, could've done some research, but we've tolerated worse.

The problem with voting is that it has more to do with views than question quality. I tried to explain that once, and Jon Skeet of all people took me to task. He said that if 1000 viewers found the post useful, it should get 1000 votes.

I don't think he's exactly unbiased, given his rep.

@RobertHarvey and that his answers get a lot of votes

The vast majority of rep that I've gotten on Stack Overflow are on questions that I was able to write a fast concise, clear answer to a question that many people already know the answer to.

user41796

@RobertHarvey Too bad you can't suspend for rep whoring, right? :-D And I'm laughing at the mere thought of the flame war that would erupt if a mod suspended Skeet.

3:28 PM

@RobertHarvey true fast answers always get more view/votes than late answers

When a mod suspends Jon Skeet, the universe unsuspends.

What you'd really have to do is take away his Unicorn painting.

or revert all his mass upvoted answers

@RobertHarvey: Yeah, something like half of my rep on SO is from answering how to do a for loop in bash scripting

which anyone could have answered, I just happened to get there first

user41796

I think if I seriously try to up my SO repz then I'm going to pursue open bounties. Seems to be the best route for accumulating rep quickly.

user41796

And I will of course write epic MSO rants if the bounty is given to someone else.

3:37 PM

That can work, if you like doing research. There's one guy who was earning 500 to 1000 rep per day with this strategy.

user41796

@RobertHarvey I'm kind of used to doing research for Progs questions anyway, so it seems like a good fit.

user55340

The problem, as always, with SO is trying to find those research worthy questions rather than the 'what is the regex to match XYZ?' and the like

@GlenH7 Having some prior knowledge in the problem domain can help. Otherwise, it's "learn the language and the framework, set up his operating environment, make some sample data," etc. etc.

@RobertHarvey and by that time someone with knowledge of the domain will have answered from memory

user41796

Most definitely. I have to be selective in what I go after simply out of respect for my own time. 50 extra repz isn't motivating enough to go learn something brand new.

3:46 PM

@ratchetfreak Researchers often have a leg up. Answerers with prior domain knowledge are often handicapped by prior assumptions, failure to tailor their answers to the OP's level of expertise, and general laziness in answering questions. I've never seen Eric Lippert write a lazy answer (only lazy comments).

That's another thing. Why don't we have more people like Jon Skeet and Eric Lippert? I can only imagine that they take one look at the front page and decide "this isn't the level of discourse I'm interested in."

or the other people actually need time for what they do for a living and can't devote the time to write comprehensive answers

That's my problem. I spend far too much time here, TBH.

user114359

@RobertHarvey stack exchange is addicting

But I don't have the wealth of domain knowledge that Jon Skeet and Eric Lippert do.

@Snowman and once you have discovered the other SE sites you will never leave

user114359

3:53 PM

I know, some days I bounce around the "hot topics" list and get sucked into reading related questions that people link

When the founders of SE started their social engineering project, I don't think they had any idea how complex it would get.

user114359

interesting you bring up the social engineering aspect, that is exactly what this is about. Getting experts in each field to be regulars at their respective SE sites

user114359

or, in other words: how do you encourage smart professions to WANT to help random idiots on the interwebs?

and the best way to do it is with virtual kudos (reputation)

user41796

Whee! My first foray in to bounty hunting is done.

3:58 PM

I don't bother with 50 rep bounties. If it's important enough to stick a bounty on, I start at 250, and work my way up from there. The last one I placed was for 400.

user41796

I'm desperate for rep.

user41796

:-)

user41796

And I was misreading the bountied question page. I had thought the green box around number of answers meant an answer had already been accepted. And the first one that had 0 answers and was within my knowledge had a 50 rep bounty.

user114359

Whee! I am off to an hour-long meeting that will be as exciting as watching paint dry!

bounty is separate from accepting

user41796

4:02 PM

@ratchetfreak Agreed. But I won't bother writing another answer if one has already been accepted. Seems unlikely I'll get any repz out of that effort.

user55340

@GlenH7 new delete vote therapy query: data.stackexchange.com/programmers/query/219998/…

user41796

@MichaelT I like that.

@MichaelT can you filter out the already deleted questions?

@GlenH7 I think SO rep is easiest to gain by just playing FGITW on a section you know well enough. It's easy and doesn't take a lot of effort or time to go correct some simple code with bugs

user55340

@ratchetfreak not until a data refresh... (you'll note they're all in the past week)

4:08 PM

Is it worth trying to delete those highly-upvoted posts, or should we just flag them and request deletion?

user41796

@JimmyHoffa I need to look over the niche tags that I can do well in.

@GlenH7 doesn't have to be niche - if you know a language you'll find lots of stupidly simple Q's on that language because a lot of SO users are still learning and struggling with very basic stuff

user41796

@RobertHarvey Anything past 4 community votes seems unlikely. So I'll downvote, VTD, and then flag.

You know C# and Java, you'd probably do fine in either tag just need to be fast proportional to how simple the Q is because simpler Q's have more people hunting them

user41796

@JimmyHoffa niche gives me more time with FGITW. And I worry about the stupid simple ones for not attracting up votes or getting the answer selected.

user55340

4:10 PM

@RobertHarvey I'd still toss a vote on them to get more community input on it (its not Yannis trying to learn haskell again). I'd also double check against an anon-feedback checker for the post to see if they're actually helpful to people and should be locked instead.

@GlenH7 I suggest you troll haskell

user55340

Per post anon-feedback

@GlenH7 you don't have to worry about that, the stupid simple ones get up votes because there's more people looking at them than niche ones

user41796

@JimmyHoffa That's a good point too

user55340

I've found that anon-feedback tends to be a bit more 'honest' than regular votes. I've seen things with dozens of up votes that are nearly consistently - anon feedback... people aren't finding what they're looking for there even though it looks helpful.

4:12 PM

Moderator monkey sighting:

Mark W, Madison, WI

1.3k 4 16

java swing eclipse maven multithreading unit-testing ant

user55340

@RobertHarvey absolutely... especially given the location.

Oh, snap. Didn't notice that.

user55340

Btw, read museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Hoaxipedia/Lady_Liberty_on_Lake_Mendota

user55340

user55340

Such a beautiful and classic image for Madisonians.

4:15 PM

the thing about FGITW is you'll get 0-3 upvotes per answer, so usually it'll not be worth a lot and didn't help people a great deal, but you knock out 3-6 of them a day and it don't take a lot of work and you'll get a steady stream of rep

user55340

And another of their bits...

user55340

surroundedbyreality.com/uw/other/presidents/pinkf.asp

user55340

> On the morning of the first day of classes passer-bys were treated with the site of 1,008 plastic pink flamingos placed on Bascom Hill by members of the Pail & Shovel Party. By 2 p.m. that day they were gone, taken one-by-one by students. They appeared for years afterwards in dorm rooms, apartments, and everywhere around campus. Today the Wisconsin Historical Society has one in their collection.

user55340

> Sep 1, 2009 Madison City Council Makes Plastic Flamingo Madison's Official Bird
30 years, almost to the day. The new mascot was debated for five minutes, and then the Common Council voted 15-4 to make the plastic pink flamingo the official city bird. Columnist Doug Moe proposed the idea in a column, Alder Marsha Rummel brought it to the council.

4:16 PM

@JimmyHoffa Jon Skeet is very good at that, especially for Java questions. He has a one-two punch where he provides a quick answer that gets two or three upvotes, and then fleshes out the answer in the next 5 or 10 minutes and gets four more upvotes.

At least two of those votes are just because he's Jon Skeet.

@RobertHarvey this doesn't necessarily work for people other than Jon skeet though :P

No, but he has good technique. Eric Lippert achieves his scores through almost infinite knowledge of the subject matter and brute force. He never FGITW's.

it helps working on a project that a significant number of people are essentially asking things about

Q: Entity Framework 6 compatibility with ODAC

Yes, that helps a lot. I used to be better at answering ASP.NET MVC questions than I am now, but I've been out of it too long.

@MichaelT: Do you know anything about the Oracle Data Access Components for Oracle Client 12.1.0.1.2?

0

I have a project that uses EF 6. So far I've been using SQL CE for development purposes, but time has come to integrate the project with an Oracle database. I installed Oracle Data Access Components for Oracle Client 12.1.0.1.2 and noticed that I was having problems integrating it into my projec...

c# oracle entity-framework entity-framework-5 entity-framework-6

user55340

@RobertHarvey not at the level that one's asking. I really haven't used much of an oracle backend since 10g. Places I've been since have been MySQL shops or Postgres and only use Oracle when a specific third party application (arcgis) requires it... and in that case, I wasn't doing any coding against it.

4:30 PM

The guy on the forum makes no sense. He says to "run an EF5 instance inside an EF6 instance," but then implies that there's an EF5 backward compatibility switch and then says the Framework version matters.

user55340

@RobertHarvey you might check with DBA to see if you should migrate it there... or just migrate it and see if it gets fixed? ;-)

It's not exactly a DBA issue.

One of these days I'm going to learn EF. But I have this sinking feeling that EF has become a twenty-tentacled monster, like everything else Microsoft gets their hands on.

user41796

@RobertHarvey I'm half-tempted to make a comment about self-fulfilling prophecies there but MS beat you to it.

I rather like micro-ORM's like Massive. But nobody seems to want to do table-based relational design anymore. They all want to write classes, and then generate the tables from the classes. It's ass-backwards, if you ask me.

user41796

Although I'll admit that EF6 makes it really easy to quickly tap into really wide tables.

user41796

4:41 PM

Just read my mind already ....

Or, they want to write programs based on ginormous key/value stores.

user41796

@RobertHarvey Let's reinvent the Windows Registry!

Indeed.

As in "NoSQL is cool." [Beavis and Butthead laugh]

psr

@RobertHarvey Some web sites that really really care about putting the correct highest rated "thing" on the top of a list use some kind of Bayesian (I think) algorithm to determine whether 3 5-star reviews are better than 120 5-star and 7 1-star. Something like that might help rank questions better (or even late answers), but image the joy you would have explaining it, especially if rep used a similar system.

I don't get these questions that ask "Does my design violate LSP?" "Does it violate the Law of Demeter?"

How well does your design fulfill your actual software requirements? — Robert Harvey 43 secs ago

4:46 PM

cargo cult programming

seeing those kinds of questions makes me increasingly grouchy

So I'm not the only one.

I am thankful that years ago I realized that those kinds of questions, the thinking/working on it with respect to code, was a form of procrastination or avoiding the right things to be doing

user41796

Pfffft. Software requirements? Funk that.

user41796

@whatsisname It can also reflect over-design which is easily answered with YAGNI.

over-design is the procrastination / avoiding the right problem

4:49 PM

I'm trying to get through the LSP article on Wikipedia, but it's incomprehensible. What's the TL;DR?

@RobertHarvey: something along the lines that if you have a bunch of classes that all adhere to some interface, you should be able to swap any of them around and things should not have errors

user41796

@JimmyHoffa has a good explanation of LSP I thought.

or something like that

Contravariance and Covariance. Really complicated and overly weighty words for concepts that are probably very simple.

user41796

@RobertHarvey Hence @JimmyHoffa knowing those after his studies of Haskell.

4:50 PM

if I have a class File, and another class SpiffyFile that is a subtype

anywhere I am using SpiffyFile, if I was to for whatever reason swap in File, everything should continue along smoothly

psr

@RobertHarvey Does my library form a epimorphic category? Can this function be generalized to arbitrary monoidal categories, blah, blah, blah

@whatsisname Well, that's exactly what I'm going to say in my answer, then.

hopefully it's correct

Close enough. I provided the Wikipedia example of an LSP violation in my answer as further clarification.

as time goes on I start to think that teaching OO in schools is a recipe for misery

/grouch

user41796

5:03 PM

@whatsisname It all depends upon the instructor.

I'm starting to believe that most schools have it backwards. Functional composition should be taught first. Then object orientation.

OO is really a way to organize source code

That's right. The main draw of OO is the ceremony that it brings. Reading OO code is very easy to do, because you have all those fences around everything.

user41796

Many instructors don't have much (if any) practical experience in building non-trivial applications. So they've never been burned by their bad decisions and therefore haven't learned better approaches.

but it doesn't develop the skill of taking some problem in the real world, and breaking it down into something a computer can execute

and good old procedural code is the best way to learn that, because thats what all code eventually boils down to

user41796

5:05 PM

@whatsisname heresy!

> s/in schools//f

FTFY

fchools?

One of these days I'm going to learn that notation.

user41796

@RobertHarvey grymoire.com/Unix/Sed.html

user41796

@JimmyHoffa Why are you putting f on the tail end there?

You know you're a real programmer when you tell jokes in Sed.

A: What can go wrong if the Liskov substitution principle is violated?

5:15 PM

25

I think it's stated very well in that question which is one of the reasons that was voted so highly. Now when calling Close() on a Task, there is a chance the call will fail if it is a ProjectTask with the started status, when it wouldn't if it was a base Task. Imagine if you will: pub...

@GlenH7 f = first, g = global (has always been my assumption though it may be wrong, I use emacs remember?)

user41796

@JimmyHoffa AFAIK, emacs just piped it to sed to let sed do the work

@GlenH7 emacs doesn't use that notation the way I use it... I just m-x replace-string

user41796

pretty certain you don't have to specify f. Without g it takes the first match and is done.

6:32 PM

whats with all the LSP questions today

There's only one, thoroughly discussed in here.

→ 79 messages moved to Liskov Substitution

user41796

@RobertHarvey is this question suitable for SO? programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/254157/…

user41796

Or just close as primarily opinion based?

user55340

Finally got around to doing this - data.stackexchange.com/programmers/query/220020/…

user55340

6:36 PM

@RobertHarvey you can clearly see that that question sucks - or at least isn't what people coming from the outside think is a good question... and to an extent, those are the ones we're most after.

user55340

Post Link                                                              id    Q/A +/-/? AnonVotecount viewCount Score Author
---------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- --- ----- ------------- --------- ----- ----------------
Answer programming for "What are your interests?" interview questions? 11910 Q   +     20            8716      21    Morgan Herlocker
Answer programming for "What are your interests?" interview questions? 11910 Q   -     70            8716      21    Morgan Herlocker

user55340

The anon feedback on that question is +20/-70.

@GlenH7 I don't see a problem to be solved there. He seems more interested in knowing why.

user41796

TY. I'll go with primarily opinion based. Doesn't seem answerable from that point of view.

user55340

The score on the question is +21/-1... that question sucks for trying to say "this is what our site is about" - its got high views and such, but that's not the type of thing people are looking for.

7:07 PM

@MichaelT I threw a flag on it. That will be about my twelfth one. @ThomasOwens will love me today. If he gives me static, I'll just offer to trade places with him for a day. We'll see how well he likes moderating SO.

user55340

@RobertHarvey You need to do a moderator exchange program with Yannis... come on, you know SO will be much better afterwards.

user55340

And I've got one there too... the thing is, this is a useful tool to see if the real audience for the site (not just the ones that have local up votes... but the unknown google hordes) are actually finding what they're looking for.

Yannis will just pour tequila over everything.

user55340

@RobertHarvey Nah... Bircardi 151... Tequila doesn't burn unless you're already volatilizing it.

I think Stack Overflow is drunk enough already.

user55340

7:13 PM

(speaking from experience there... btw... fun breakfast 'omelet': jack cheese, peppers, onions, other breakfast appropriate veggies... melt it together in a pan... pour Jack on it and light it on fire... Jack and Jack for breakfast... no alcohol actually consumed)

user55340

This is a variation on Saganaki (something Yannis might have experience with):

user55340

Saganaki

Saganaki (Greek σαγανάκι) refers to various Greek dishes prepared in a small frying pan, itself called a saganaki, the best-known being an appetizer of fried cheese. == Etymology == The word saganaki is a diminutive of sagani, a frying pan with two handles, which comes from the Turkish word sahan 'copper dish', itself borrowed from Arabic صحن (ṣaḥn). == Description == The cheese used in cheese saganaki is usually graviera, kefalograviera, halloumi, kasseri, kefalotyri, or sheep's milk feta cheese. Regional variations include the use of formaella cheese in Arachova and halloumi cheese in Cyprus...

So you need a saganaki to make saganaki.

I wonder if I can get any of those cheeses at Trader Joe's.

user55340

You should... though whats key for the real one is the hard cheese.

user55340

Jack is nice for the 'omelet' in that it melts very easily.

user55340

7:16 PM

Note the proper thing to do with it is light it on fire (some brandy)...

user55340

►

OK, that's just dangerous.

user55340

@RobertHarvey that's the theatrical waiter... its not nearly as dangerous.

Yum.

user55340

The thing is that its a rather simple recipe... you can easily get it right and than work on variations from that without wording about the process afterwards.

user55340

7:24 PM

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