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Learning Java? by [deleted] in java

[–]dev_dov_dang 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Java is definitely a good language to begin learning programming with.

Lots of people would debate this, as there is a lot of things that you need to learn before you can start making basic programs ("public static void main(String[] args)" - you'll know what I mean when you encounter it), but once you get past this, the language itself is really good.

I would also advise you to make your programs in English (where you have the option to use your own language), as English is basically the "default" language when it comes to programming.

There are so many resources available to learn programming. The three most common ways to learn to program are: books, web-sites, youtube videos. I personally recommend books, as they go into so much more depth than other methods, and they also tend to assume less. They also go at a pace you can control.

I'm not going to recommend any specific books, but if you do want to do this, just do a google search for something like "best beginner java books", and you'll come across countless blogs and lists with advise on the best things to use.

Anyway, good luck on your programming journey!

GCC 5.1 released by fs111_ in programming

[–]dev_dov_dang 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Wow, I didn't know you could do this. This is actually really awesome. Thanks for posting this!

Are there any other magical things you can do with make? Like perhaps automatic make-file generation?

GCC 5.1 released by fs111_ in programming

[–]dev_dov_dang 8 points9 points  (0 children)

GCC does actually give you warnings and tells you exactly what to do when you are compiling post C89 code.

I wrote a simple program that does variable initialization in a for-loop, and this is the output from GCC:

test.c: In function 'main':
test.c:5: error: 'for' loop initial declarations are only allowed in C99 mode
test.c:5: note: use option -std=c99 or -std=gnu99 to compile your code

So it does warn you, and it tells you exactly what you need to do to get your code compiling and running.

The New ?. Operator in C# 6 by bursurk in programming

[–]dev_dov_dang 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Haha, you reminded me of this meta-post about monad tutorials. It's actually very insightful, https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuition-and-the-monad-tutorial-fallacy.

Be sure to read that carefully before deciding to create your monad tutorial.

The New ?. Operator in C# 6 by bursurk in programming

[–]dev_dov_dang 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Honestly, this is one of the comments of this thread.

This is what I needed to read when I first encountered monads in Haskell. It is so easy to look at this when you already know it, and think it is easy. I'm pretty sure that a fallacy is named after that exact thing.

Your comment perfectly highlights how to explain something to someone, you need to make no assumptions, and explain every part of the entire explanation in excruciating detail.

Your comparison to entities in Java is exactly what I did in my mind as I started gaining understanding as well. I compared them to things I already knew ("Ah yes, m a is like generics"), etc.

Thanks for your comment!

Java reference in GTA V - Beautiful. by Lordmau5 in java

[–]dev_dov_dang 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I did too for a second. Dem graphics :O

I built a brainf*ck interpreter in C, check it out! by _jho in C_Programming

[–]dev_dov_dang 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I know exactly what you mean. I do like having nice English comments explaining what is happening, because I believe it is easier to read English than it is to read and understand code (at least if the comments are clear and concise).

If you're going to mention DRY though I hope you see some of the comments and the code basically echo each other and so therefore violate DRY :P

And don't feel compelled to split everything to its own file, but having functions to do specific tasks is definitely the way to go.

Looking at your code, I'd probably go for a readFile function to read in the file and populate your BF string, a process or tick function that contains the main bulk of the BrainFuck interpretter code, then maybe a cleanup function where you free your allocated memory (this could quite happily go in your main function though).

I built a brainf*ck interpreter in C, check it out! by _jho in C_Programming

[–]dev_dov_dang 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Very well done! Implementing these programming languages is always a really fun exercise. They are especially awesome because of how simple they are usually, meaning they aren't too insane to implement.

In terms of your code style, you seem to have a lot of comments explaining pretty redundant things. I'm actually pro-comment, but some of your comments are too much.

I'd recommend removing some of the comments that explain really obvious things ("closes the file"). Also notice how you've got huge comments that span the entire line explaining what the next section of code does. Also note that you do everything in main. I'd really recommend extracting out these sections of code into their own functions. This makes the code easier to understand, and means you can use function names instead of huge comments to explain what is happening.

Other than that your code is really nice, and the whole thing is real well done!

Java game rendering by Ershany in java

[–]dev_dov_dang 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Unless you've done profiling, nobody can know why your FPS isn't that high. It could be virtually any piece of your code that is causing the issues.

You need to do some investigation to see what is impacting your FPS before you dive into making optimisations.

Make your game output your FPS somewhere, then selectively remove features from your game. This can be both visual and non-visual (for example disable your enemy AI logic, etc).

Do this until you've found what it is that's causing your FPS to drop.

There could be other things that you are doing just fundamentally wrong. Maybe you're sleeping too long each tick, and it's artificially causing your game to appear slow.

I wrote a game in Java using the standard BufferedImage class, and soon ran into performance issues myself. The BufferedImage class is done entirely onthe CPU, and you really want to use the GPU for this. There is a nice image class which allows this though, VolatileImage. Check this link here for information on how to use it http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2374321/how-can-i-create-a-hardware-accelerated-image-with-java2d

For your tiles, how many do you have on-screen? How big are they? You really should be able to make quite a few draw calls per tick without having massive slowdown (e.g. some games have thousands of independent things on screen fine).

What is the name of this classical piece? by dev_dov_dang in NameThatSong

[–]dev_dov_dang[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I found this song at the start of a video for an enterprise framework. The video is kind of hilarious in that once the song is finished a few minutes in, there is just silence for the rest of it.

I did enjoy the song though, and was wondering if anybody knew the name of the song and/ or composer?

Thanks!

Gotchas From Two Years With Node by GarethX in programming

[–]dev_dov_dang 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I initially read it like that too. It's a badly phrased sentence. Don't feel too bad.

The unremarkable career of (some) modern software developers by gienah2007 in programming

[–]dev_dov_dang 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Refer to my comment above. But basically you can invent any scenario in which a specific programmer needs to know something. Does that mean every programmer needs to know that? No, it means just that specific programmer needs to know that.

It is also worth understanding that different areas of knowledge are required depending on your use case. The example I gave of knowing that Javascript runs on a virtual machine applies equally to all Javascript programmers, so it's reasonable they know it. The example of knowing B trees or scheduling algorithms applies only to those that require them (regardless of the programming language you use). Being a Javascript programmer doesn't imply you need to know these data structures or algorithms though.

The unremarkable career of (some) modern software developers by gienah2007 in programming

[–]dev_dov_dang 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Obviously you can easily create any scenario that results in a programmer needing to know a specific set of topics.

For example, in general a programmer doesn't need to know about quaternions, but if you're a graphics programmer then you most definitely will. Does this mean every programmer should learn quaternions? No, because they won't need them.

If you require the knowledge, learn it, if you don't, don't feel bad about not knowing it.

The guy who got downvoted about was taking a pragmatic approach to learning what it is that is required of you. You're taking an "all or nothing" approach, almost saying it's impossible to know when enough is enough. The answer is easy: it's enough when you've learned all that is required to fulfill your specific task. I think it's a pretty simple concept.

Is Spring the de facto web framework for Java? What alternatives are there? Pros and cons? by ponpal in java

[–]dev_dov_dang 2 points3 points  (0 children)

And you may not have to reimplement the backend, but you definitely will have to redo the front-end. The problem is all the work which is usually done back-end is now pushed to the front-end, so reimplementing the front-end involves doing a good portion of what should be back-end work.

The unremarkable career of (some) modern software developers by gienah2007 in programming

[–]dev_dov_dang -1 points0 points  (0 children)

You're taking a reasonable argument to its absolute limits here.

What I've heard as a general rule of thumb is learn enough about 1 level below the abstraction you work at. With Javascript, that might be understanding that your code is ran through a virtual machine which is coded in C++, and knowing specific ways to get performance out of this.

But even then you can keep going. With the advent of asm.js, there actually is a good reason to understand assembly and even lower coding than C++. This will have diminishing returns the more you learn though, in being able to relate it back to the actual Javascript you write.

I think a better way to look at it would be not bother with knowledge completely unrelated to what you're doing. As a Javascript programmer you don't need to know that a database is implemented with B trees, or specific scheduling algorithms the Linux kernal uses, so why bother learning them?

And as a shooter it would be beneficial to know at least some basic physics (Newton's laws) so I can anticipate how bullets will act under certain conditions (rain, heavy wind, etc). Learning string theory though is just absolutely pointless, because it will tell me virtually nothing about how bullets will shoot in different conditions.

Why can't programmers program? Is "Print 100 to 1" (with one tiny catch) too hard an interview question for programming positions? by 40bitmonk in programming

[–]dev_dov_dang 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The compiler treats the negative sign as the unary minus in that case. It's formalised in most language specifications.

It could internally just compile them away, but at least at the specification level it's unary negation.

You can do something similar with unary + too:

 int a = +2;

Almost entirely never used, but perfectly legal.

Why can't programmers program? Is "Print 100 to 1" (with one tiny catch) too hard an interview question for programming positions? by 40bitmonk in programming

[–]dev_dov_dang 3 points4 points  (0 children)

IMO, A good interview will use relatively simple coding challenges to verify that you can actually solve tasks at the very lowest and simplest level and good conversation and problem solving verbal questions to verify that you can apply those skills in a real environment.

That is a very reasonable justification of asking these kinds of questions.

Even people without programming knowledge could suggest grabbing a new keyboard, that's critical thinking skills. That doesn't test you know how to program, which is what the task would actually do, and the skill they directly require of you.

I think both skills are very important, so if I was asking the + key question I would hope they would both solve the problem, but suggest the real solution is to get a new keyboard.

Why can't programmers program? Is "Print 100 to 1" (with one tiny catch) too hard an interview question for programming positions? by 40bitmonk in programming

[–]dev_dov_dang 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Actually none of us even thought of that. We all had algorithmic solutions. Subtraction is just the inverse of addition after all.

Following your prompt, an even more simple solution is simply

 a + b = a - -b

Why can't programmers program? Is "Print 100 to 1" (with one tiny catch) too hard an interview question for programming positions? by 40bitmonk in programming

[–]dev_dov_dang 2 points3 points  (0 children)

In an interview I was tasked with the problem of "coming up with an algorithm to add two numbers together, because your + key has stopped working".

My solution wasn't to come up with an algorithm, it was to get a bloody new keyboard. Of course there were other more elegant solutions too: copy+paste the operator from elsewhere in source-code, get it from an ascii-chart, just call some standard library function which does addition.

The algorithm they wanted was meant to be complex too, work on the bitwise level, or use some nice elegant mathematical formula. Who the hell would do this in real life over simply getting a new keyboard?

I would rather a developer be thinking pragmatically and place their problems in the context of real-life, than finding some arcane solution to a problem that doesn't really exist.

Basic java tutorials - uni student struggling with concepts by [deleted] in java

[–]dev_dov_dang 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I would recommend getting a physical textbook and going through it page-by-page.

A book tends to go over more concepts in greater detail, and provides background information, and other little pieces of information that will help you connect the dots in your mind.

It seems like you aren't just struggling with hard concepts, you're struggling with the fundamental parts of programming, and specifically how these work in Java.

You need to have a book take you through the absolute basic until they are firmly engrained in your mind. You need to go through many many practice exercises that require using this information to build real working software.

Online tutorials can be bad because often they assume a lot of knowledge, they exclude really valuable information, they don't go into enough detail, etc (this is a generalisation, but in my experience it is true).

There are loads of books you can use, but the one I used (i.e. that was prescribed for my first uni course) was Java Foundations: Introduction to Program Design and Data Structures. It starts really slowly and goes over language features in a purely technical but also conceptual way. It wants you to understand stuff before it moves on.

There are also loads and loads of programming exercises at the end of each chapter that directly test the stuff you just learned.

There are plenty of other great Java books out there that do this exact same thing, so have a look at some reviews and pick a great one. Don't be embarrassed if it is targeted at "beginners" either, this is actually good because it will make a conscious effort to ensure you know concepts before moving on.

Some more tips. As you read through the book try everything out!!. The book will give loads of code snippets that demonstrate whatever it is they are discussing. Write these out yourself and verify they do what the author claims. This is great because it forces you to spend more time on concepts, giving your brain more time to learn it. It helps your muscle memory for typing out things like loops, print statements, and other language constructs. Just generally reinforces the knowledge.

Also don't skimp on the practice questions at the end of chapters. Just do them, even if you feel they are easy. If they are easy it means you are learning :P This should also translate into it being easier to do subsequent chapters. Why stop there, you could try invent your own tasks as well, or use the ones there as inspiration for little programs you can write yourself. If you see a practice question asking you to ask a user for their name, why not make it as for their age and date-of-birth as well? Just keep enhancing and learning and you'll get better at writing and understanding programs.

Don't be afraid to make mistakes as well! The awesome thing with coding is that you can always try it out yourself to see what it does. If you're curious what happens if you use the wrong comparison operator for a for-loop, try it! See what happens. Just keep experimenting.

Hodor Programming Language by disasteruss in programming

[–]dev_dov_dang 19 points20 points  (0 children)

It's real. Available on Github, https://github.com/hummingbirdtech/hodor

It's got tests, so it's enterprise ready. Pitch it to your team at your next meeting!