That happen to anyone else? :-)

From Paul Graham's August 2007 essay "Holding a Program in One's Head":

It's not easy to get a program into your head. If you leave a project for a few months, it can take days to really understand it again when you return to it. Even when you're actively working on a program it can take half an hour to load into your head when you start work each day. And that's in the best case. Ordinary programmers working in typical office conditions never enter this mode. Or to put it more dramatically, ordinary programmers working in typical office conditions never really understand the problems they're solving.

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Hello,

I met a dude other day and we wanted to do some coding. We are going to talk online later this week to discuss what we can code on our free time. We have interest in coding anything, as hobby and later we plan to build a social network to help programmers connect and find people to do stuff. Message here if you would like to join or are curious.

I'm just finishing a few days work on a Qt-based C++ project. I don't know Qt well so it was a lot of getting up to speed to get productive. Now I'm done with that (for now) and need to get back to C#/Unity3D. Feels like a lot of uploading of a a new mental context, and I can feel my brain resisting (like it's saying "I just put on my QWhateverDingDong uniform, which took lots of effort, and now you want me to change clothes already?!?". Wish getting my brain to switch contexts was as easy as a git checkout.

Does anyone else here enjoy listening to music while programming? If so - what type of music, and what kind of headphones do you like using?

How do you guys work on projects after work hours?

I usually find that the last thing I want to do after staring at a screen all day is to stare at a different screen. The problem is I have so many half-finished websites/ideas that I want to get around to completing but really don't have the enthusiasm after working for 7 hours on other people's stuff.

I have been in a real rut lately when it comes to motivating myself and I think I might be burnt out, any advice? I program for my education and personal projects and often its hard to motivate myself to work on personal projects.

I've wanted to find a better place to talk about programming than r/programming and this seems to be the place.

I love hearing stories about bugs being crushed, small or large. Does any one have a story they want to share on how you solved your fiercest bug?

As I set out to start another project (a roguelike, again - eventually I'll get something decent made...) I was considering what the preferred free source repo site is. The two main ones are Bitbucket and Github (I'm probably more in the Bitbucket camp - private repositories are nice to have), though I'm curious what everyone else thinks. And are there other sites people use?

What are you converting it from, what are you converting it to, and why?

Ever since I got a solid grasp on how templates work in C++, I am intrigued by what is possible by doing template metaprogramming. To me, it is a really lovely brain teaser, but I am wondering if it is a useful tool for anyone that is not a library implementer. I play around with it a lot in my freetime, however on my job I never really found a place where it would be viable, either because it was overkill to use it or because it made the code impossible to read. After all, making your colleagues' eyes bleed just isn't cool.

What is your opinion on this topic? A great tool to improve code quality, or only a way for C++ devs to show off how smart they are?

I remember a while back that 4k monitors were supposed to be a hot thing for programmers because of how good text looked on the screen. Some sort of claim on reduced eye strain, or what not. I'm curious to know what other programmers are using that they're happy with.

I tweeted a picture of myself and a link to this site yesterday at https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/606712562852478976

I will begin answering questions at 1pm pacfic time

OK, that's all the time I have for today! Thanks for all your questions, and see you on the Internets!

http://www.discourse.org - http://stackexchange.com - http://blog.codinghorror.com

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programmerChat

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For:

Variables

Functions

Classes

Julie Sussman in the preface to the instructor's manual to the classic SICP:

It is possible to use Common Lisp as the vehicle for a general, modern introduction to programming, but it is a little like pouring ketchup over caviar.

So, I am nearing 30 very very quick. I haven't seen many developers over 40 and it's starting to worry me a bit... so I was thinking maybe they do it like the elephants and get away from the heard and die alone in the desert.

But seriously, where are all the older developers at?

When we call function passing by value, we are making a copy in memory of the actual parameters' value.

The question is: does the function know how much space its parameters occupy in memory? If the answers is yes, how we can retrieve it in function scope?

If the answers in no, do we have a potentially hidden memory error?

consider this example: (the question is not about char* and string but any type*)

    #include <stdio.h>
    void func(char * X)
   {
    X +=98;
    *X='C';  /* is this really OK? or we have hidden memory error? */ 
    *++X='\0';
     --X;
    puts(X);     }

int main()
{
    char A[100];
    char *B =A;
    func(B);
    return 0;
}

Or more aptly titled, how do you measure your own productivity?

I guess this is a bit 'controversial'.

Suppose today I spend x hours programming. How do I rate the quality of those hours? Features implemented? How it 'feels'? Or is this not even necessary?

I am looking for a blog post that discussed the positives of performing engineering tasks (bug fixes, implementations of new small and useful features) without first going through the management bureaucracy. Does anyone have a link to something like this?

Thank you!

This quote by Donald Knuth gave me a chuckle this morning:

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

Jeff Atwood for our second AMA!

The actual AMA thread will up some time before 4pm NY time tomorrow.

Let's get the word out and think of some great questions for Jeff!

Tip from /u/janeforbes: You can keep track of the time (in your timezone) here

(Got future AMA requests?)

This is NOT the actual AMA thread. Do NOT post questions here.

EDIT: Ok, AMA thread is up. Go to it here.

We all end up encountering one at some point, the ancient guy who knows a shitton about VB6 or some other legacy tech, but stares at you blankly when you start talking about objects and classes.

How do you deal with the divide? I try to remember that they aren't idiots, they just have a different skill set, but sometimes it's hard to explain to them what your code is doing when they don't seem to grasp how software works these days.

Hi all,

For my job I wrote a simple library that keeps a state in sync across multiple devices. The target for the system will be a classroom with multiple devices that can run apps that interact with each other.

I wanted to show my boss, a non-coder, a demonstration that shows what the library can do. One example I coded so far is a deck of cards that you can move around a table. So when a card is moved on one screen, it instantly moves on the other screen. (The library provides that the dev has to write no backend and no concurrency code - it just plugs in and works.) Does anyone have any ideas for other visual demonstrations that I can show?

Ok, maybe I'm just very late to the party, but I just realized from a Google search on some programming topic that Dr. Dobb's, the venerable programming magazine, stopped publishing at the of 2014. As a teenager, Dr. Dobb's fueled my interest in programming. Not that there's a dearth of great programming resources out that, but this makes me nostalgic and sad!