Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Old-school programming techniques you probably don't miss

computerworld.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 33 posts

Re: Old-school programming techniques you probably don't miss

#11

Post by sachmanb »

Ah yes, I remember one of my favorite assets being my mouse driver so that I could have mouse support in my applications...and then the happiness of porting it to Pascal from C and having it work in there too...nice big binary arrays to define what cursors look like...I'm glad I don't write mouse drivers or having to double buffer graphics anymore -- but on the other hand, figuring out everyone else's APIs, languages, frameworks, each with their own style, is a pain too.

Sometimes I find a really awesome javascript library that does exactly what I need it to do, but I find configuring it is a pain, or it is missing just one or two things that I need and I'm reading the source code and I really don't want to edit it...so I just write my own.

Oh while I'm ranting -- all you people that are making your ridiculous number of JQuery add-ons that do almost the same thing as tons of other add-ons, or your CSS+JQuery image slide that has been done a hundred times before just so that you can prove you have figured out how to write basic javascript and so you wrote something you've already seen a hundred times before to get some more traffic to your blog that hasn't said anything new for months now....please, stop it...stop it, stop it....your ruining the quality of my google searches. Really, you don't need to post all the time, we have readers now, we don't have to individually check back on your blog all the time, write when you have something to say, not to hit a quota. Ramble complete.

Re: Old-school programming techniques you probably don't miss

#12

Post by jws »

gaius wrote: post #9

This kinda misses the point of Hungarian. I don't care that two variables are both floats, the compiler will keep track of types for me. I do care very much that I'm not trying to add a width to a height, for example. Hungarian can help with that in languages like C and Python.

Perimeter.

Re: Old-school programming techniques you probably don't miss

#14

Post by silentbicycle »

gaius wrote: post #9

This kinda misses the point of Hungarian. I don't care that two variables are both floats, the compiler will keep track of types for me. I do care very much that I'm not trying to add a width to a height, for example. Hungarian can help with that in languages like C and Python.

Indeed. That's also one of the biggest cases where static typing (especially inferred static typing) comes in handy. Mixing up those (or mistaking unit conversions!) can lead to particularly subtle bugs.

I'm haven't decided whether it's a net gain, but that's something it catches especially well.

Re: Old-school programming techniques you probably don't miss

#15

Post by scott_s »

gaius wrote: post #9

This kinda misses the point of Hungarian. I don't care that two variables are both floats, the compiler will keep track of types for me. I do care very much that I'm not trying to add a width to a height, for example. Hungarian can help with that in languages like C and Python.

In case you find yourself in C++: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_38_0/doc/html/boost_units.ht...

Re: Old-school programming techniques you probably don't miss

#16

Post by nradov »

gaius wrote: post #9

This kinda misses the point of Hungarian. I don't care that two variables are both floats, the compiler will keep track of types for me. I do care very much that I'm not trying to add a width to a height, for example. Hungarian can help with that in languages like C and Python.

In principle we ought to be able to treat width and height as two separate subtypes of some numeric type and have the compiler generate an error if we add them together. But unfortunately today's common languages like C and Java don't support that.

Here is the original Hungarian notation article by Charles Simonyi. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa260976.aspx

Re: Old-school programming techniques you probably don't miss

#17

Post by warfangle »

gaius wrote: post #8
javanix wrote: post #2

I think most CS degrees still do (and should) require the algorithms and data structures programming. They are useful skills, and, I think the reason that the section seems "old-school" comes from the proliferation of Java in early CS courses. Java has most of the algorithms and structures implemented already, and there's no point in anyone redoing it once they find those implementations, so the skills fall out of us…

The point of teaching sorting isn't to teach sorting but to teach big-O notation and how to understand complexity. That will never be obsolete.

And the point to teaching binary trees and linked lists is to teach you how things are structured under the hood...

Re: Old-school programming techniques you probably don't miss

#18

Post by Hexstream »

bcl wrote: post #5

Some of these techniques are still very useful. For example when developing for embedded systems you don't have the luxury of infinite cpu cycles and ram, you need to understand the algorithms you are using, implement your own, and be able to optimize for performance. Another way to look at it is this -- how can having more knowledge, more tools in your toolbox, hurt?

I sometimes try to acquire too much knowledge at once and don't really get anything done of what should be priorities as a result.

Re: Old-school programming techniques you probably don't miss

#20

Post by nomoresecrets »

gaius wrote: post #9

This kinda misses the point of Hungarian. I don't care that two variables are both floats, the compiler will keep track of types for me. I do care very much that I'm not trying to add a width to a height, for example. Hungarian can help with that in languages like C and Python.

I think you have encountered the conflict between Apps Hungarian and Systems Hungarian:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation#Systems_vs._...

Post reply on HN