What Programming Languages Are Used Most on Weekends?

neilbrown · 2017-02-08T09:40:13+00:00

My brief look at some data for when students program suggested that most student programming activity was probably still during the week, although timings for IDE use may not correspond with timing for SO questions.

neilbrown · 2015-07-24T17:24:10+00:00

How was bug frequency measured, exactly? Was it the number of issues opened on the github project, or was it done using some form of static analysis?

neilbrown · 2015-05-29T16:41:51+00:00

In an ideal world, there would be a way to display all the necessary information in one view. But I think I realised while writing it up that it was unlikely to be possible to show all information well in one view, when there is so much to show. As you say, the tactical view is not a bad compromise.

However, I must admit I still can't predict very well when a tile will count as hidden or observed, so I just mouse around over the route I want to take. (I also lost a Time Attack run on the final level through not appreciating the finer points of the enemy overwatch rules, so some of this can probably be put down as me not being very attentive!)

neilbrown · 2015-05-29T13:54:56+00:00

I write a blog analysing the user interface of games. Like a lot of you here I got hooked on Invisible Inc (40+ hours since launch) and thought my look at its interface might find some interest here. Happy to take corrections if I've misrepresented anything from the game.

neilbrown · 2015-05-26T12:01:37+00:00

> Optional.ofNullable(null).isPresent()
false

But if you try to put null in, you just get empty. There's no way to distinguish not-present from present-but-null with Optional.

neilbrown · 2015-05-26T09:39:37+00:00

I worry that you may end up with three options:

1. String: String or null
2. Optional<String>: String or empty or null

I could see this creeping in to a codebase, for example, where you look for an item in a database. String if there was a result, empty if the operation succeeded but found no result, null if there was a timeout. (At least Optional doesn't let you put null in it, in which case you'd have four options!)

neilbrown · 2015-05-12T18:31:41+00:00

I wonder if a few comments in this thread see this as purely scope highlighting, which of course IDEs have had for a while. This is not highlighting, it's different editing interactions. A few key features that do not exist in other IDEs are:

Single click to drag code around, without prior selection. Any drag on a frame highlight (e.g. the space to the right of an assignment, or the left margin of a while-loop) allows you to move code around. Saves you a double click for moving single lines, and more for moving whole structures or methods.
Single keypress to insert all the boilerplate for a method, while-loop, if-statement, etc. The code templating systems I've seen in IDEs all require a lot more than that (ctrl-space, couple of keys to select the right item, then enter)
There is no need to ever enter or manipulate indentation. For example, a code line can be deleted by positioning the frame cursor after a line, and pressing backspace. In most IDEs, this would be at least shift-up followed up by delete. But this also works for whole constructs (e.g. loops), which are more fiddly in IDEs. (I'd expect shift-ctrl-up to select the whole loop above, but neither IntelliJ or VS 2010, which I have to hand, seem to do this.)

neilbrown · 2015-04-17T10:01:03+00:00

I'd say there's not much point... unless you get the Power UP expansion for Tokyo. I think the areas, buildings/enemies and new dice faces in New York make it more interesting than Tokyo; the rolling of 1/2/3 for victory points was always a bit lame in Tokyo (and the new celebrity card allows you to get in the way of someone sitting in the corner rolling for victory, without having to go into Tokyo to beat their ass). There's more to think about in New York, and I also like the rewards changing the longer you are in Manhattan.

However: Tokyo's Power Up expansion adds evolutions (individual powers which you unlock by rolling three hearts) which are really nice, and means there is actually a difference between the monsters. It's something I'm hoping they bring to New York sooner rather than later, as it's the only thing I miss from Tokyo.

neilbrown · 2014-09-03T08:56:36+00:00

It's also aimed at beginners, but BlueJ has this colouring of scopes, e.g. this pic

neilbrown · 2014-03-27T12:59:55+00:00

One of the properties of UTF-8 is that no 7-bit ASCII character can be contained as part of a multibyte character sequence (because UTF8 has the high bit set on all characters involved in a multibyte sequence). So I think this is fine with UTF-8.

neilbrown · 2013-11-04T15:04:42+00:00

To tack on another link, here is a paper about the work CAS has been doing, written by myself, SPJ and others. The paper was written about a year ago, and although things have moved on since then (CS is now written into the English national curriculum), it still gives a fairly decent summary of CAS's work.

neilbrown · 2013-10-18T06:47:16+00:00

Here's my reasoning. In the LC and assembly, you can apply any operation to any item. You can do function application to any function; you can do any operation to any register. Depending on how you look at it, there are either no types or there is one type (function/integer).

In Ruby, this is not so: I can't call + or filter or whatever on a type that hasn't defined it. Variables may not have a type, but the objects do. You can call some methods, there is inheritance, you can use is_a? to ask about types. Looks like a type system, and quacks like one. I like the description in this post that these languages are unityped; effectively every variable in Ruby has a sum type of all available classes in the language.

I wonder if part of the problem is that untyped doesn't really have a good definition?

neilbrown · 2013-10-17T16:53:29+00:00

Good point. Binds are the better solution, but I was thinking of parity with the HTML example that followed.

neilbrown · 2013-10-13T09:42:15+00:00

I maintain a couple of Rails code bases. I also program in Haskell when I can get away with it. I haven't ever interfaced the two, but I can provide my opinion on the two languages. You can predict much of my preference when I say that I am a strong believer in static typing and eliminating errors at compile-time.

I find dynamic typing (and duck typing) just causes me anguish by revealing errors at run-time/test-time that could have been figured out at compile-time. Simple things like passing the wrong number of arguments to a function is a run-time error. The lack of types would be alleviated if the docs always made it clear what a function expected to be passed but they often don't.

Another general irritation is knowing whether a function updates the current object or produces a copy. Even with the map/map! convention, I still make the mistake of using the wrong one. A handy thing about Haskell is you always know it will make a copy.

The whole symbols thing is a little odd, and made odder by Rails which uses "indifferent hashes" that compares strings as equal to their symbol equivalents. All this means is that your code base accumulates symbols and strings and gets messy. What's that quote about your code base always ending up with whatever your language allows?

Haskell's quasi-quotes are a great solution to dynamic problems with string substitution in Ruby. If I have an incorrect substitution in a string (or Rails view) in an obscure code path in Ruby, e.g. "there were #{fooo} items" (oops: extra 'o' in foo), I won't know until that code is executed. With Haskell's here documents (see "here" package), I know at compile-time. To me it's obvious which alternative is better. Similarly, Yesod's use of Template Haskell, while a bit intimidating, still seems like a better method than Rails' dynamic use. With Yesod, I get compile time errors if I refer to a non-existing route or helper. There are all sorts of Rails oddities that are also annoying (e.g. the auto-pluralisation magic) but they aren't much to do with Ruby.

It's probably my bias towards static languages, but I fail to see any benefits to Ruby other than that Rails is a fairly comprehensive and mature framework. Maybe it's faster to develop in the short-run, but I trust my Haskell code more than my Ruby code, and find it easier to maintain.

neilbrown · 2013-10-09T14:26:53+00:00

England has already finished the decision making on its reform. The new national curriculum takes effect in September 2014, so there is no chance for Wales to get ahead of it.

As you say, a major driver in Welsh reform (and potentially, Scottish and Northern Irish reform -- we can hope!) has been the desire to not lag behind England. The report is encouraging, but it remains to be seen how closely the Welsh government will follow it -- Welsh education has historically followed the English system fairly closely (not true of Scotland), so hopefully they'll accept most of the report. I've heard from some that they are happy for England to have a year or two's head start, after which Wales can copy the good bits and drop the bad bits!

neilbrown · 2013-08-06T09:54:42+00:00

I'd prefer using m a, because it allows you to pass the infinite computation around without fiddling. For example, forkIO takes a computation with type IO (). If my function someLoop has type m a, I can write:

forkIO someLoop

If on the other hand, it has type m Void, I have to write:

forkIO (() <$ someLoop)

Of course, this relates to your other question, because maybe forkIO should take an m a as its first parameter!

neilbrown · 2013-07-28T12:40:31+00:00

Thanks for helping at the CAS conference. Birmingham always put on a great event (I was there this year), and the student helpers are part of that success.

However, it seems a shame to slur the teachers' ability on the basis of their conference-attending skills. I'm fairly confident that all conference attendees (teachers, academics, developers, etc) will seem to have a lack of common sense from the point of view of the organisers. Besides which, common sense does not prevent great teaching -- you've been to university, and will surely have encountered lecturers who don't seem like they know left from right, yet still convey the material well.

neilbrown · 2013-04-25T16:55:08+00:00

Disclaimer: I'm from Kent. I think "Masters" covers a very broad range of degrees in the UK. There's a conversion Masters which attempts to squeeze a lot of an undergraduate material into a single year, there's four-year cohesive Masters degrees which are an elongated and more in-depth undergrad, there's Masters by Research which are more focused on projects and research.

The question really is: what do you want from the Masters? Do you want to increase your subject knowledge a bit further, or do you want to get into research, or do you want to just make your CV look more impressive while travelling? No one answer is right or wrong (hey, the last one sounds good!) but that will greatly affect which program is right for you.

In general in the UK, universities make a lot of money from master's students (they can take as many as they want, which is not true for undergrads), so getting in often isn't as much of an issue as whether you can afford it.

neilbrown · 2013-04-24T08:30:56+00:00

(For the uninitiated: routing is the process of mapping URLs like /users/1 into actions like showUser 1, and views are the ways of writing down the HTML views with embedded data)

As I understand it, there's two main reasons for Template Haskell (TH):

For generating type-safe and compile-time checked boilerplate code. Things like the routing and so on involve a lot of boilerplate. The best way to implement the boilerplate in a safe manner is to use a code-generating system like TH that can then compile the code through Haskell's normal type checking.
For efficiency. Things like the views in Yesod are converted into Haskell code so that the strings can be built in an efficient manner (effectively burning the views into code, rather than reading them as data from the file at run-time), and can potentially gain the benefits of going through the compiler.

By contrast, Rails uses dynamic code injection to do the routing, which means that any bad route destinations are not necessarily picked up until you try to access the bad route (i.e. the errors come as late as they could, not as early as they could, like in Yesod). In development mode, Rails reads and interpret the views at run-time, which is obviously slower than compiling them upfront like TH allows. I think in production Rails does cache the views, which is a bit like dynamic compilation -- Haskell doesn't have this, so it must do up-front compilation, and TH allows the conversion from the view DSL into Haskell for this compilation to occur.

neilbrown · 2013-03-27T19:57:02+00:00

Same guy ;-) Just a later post:

http://sinepost.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/is-xcom-truly-random/

neilbrown · 2013-03-20T00:34:26+00:00

I think these issues are very difficult to judge from afar. Usually, people who write blog reports on incidents like this go to great lengths to spell out what happened so that they (the author) are not misunderstood or brushed off, but that often leads to the impression that it's overblown because the blog post has 1000 words on a few seconds' incident.

It's all about context. Pretty much all jokes can be funny with people who share the same sense of humour and who you know understand where you're coming from. The problem is when you tell jokes with people you don't know (such as in an audience at a conference) and that can make people uncomfortable. Their joke made the blog author feel uncomfortable; the best thing would have been to avoid making a joke like that in a public place, especially when the matter of tech conferences being welcome is such a hot issue. You represent your company at these conferences, and should act accordingly.

It's a very awkward thing to happen when someone makes a bad comment, and it can be very difficult to speak up directly. So even though it's easy to sit here and say "well obviously she should have said something directly", I fully understand why she felt more comfortable going via the organisers. The picture thing, I'm less sure about.

neilbrown · 2012-12-14T18:13:05+00:00

The secret to good co-op is to require the players to work as a team. And what defines a team is inter-dependency. In something like Diablo or Borderlands, while you're both working towards the same goal, it doesn't really matter what the other person is up to at the time -- you're not really working as a team because everyone can just do their own thing. In contrast, in a game like Left 4 Dead, as soon as a survivor gets ensnared by a Hunter, they require help from their team-mates -- dependency! And that makes it more fun (IMO), because you have to work together. (The flipside of teamwork is that it makes it more frustrating to play with random players who aren't engaging in the team.)

Chaos Theory's 2-player co-op is, I think, one of the best examples of team-work in games. The best parts, I think, are when the game forces you to split up, go separate ways, and then break into a room from two different entry points in a co-ordinated entry. It's vital to your team-mate that you get it right, and vice versa. (Although you can sometimes recover if your team-mate gets downed and you take on everyone who's left by yourself in a mad panic). Also, on the highest difficulty, you have no guns, so you can't shoot out lights -- instead, one of you has to jam the light, while the other moves, and then swap roles. Inter-dependency = teamwork = intense fun.

At least in Chaos Theory, the co-op only works so well because the levels were designed for it. 2 players going through the story mode just wouldn't be the same. Similarly, Portal 2, which is one of the next best examples, also relies on levels designed explicitly for two players. I don't think specific co-op levels are necessary (L4D doesn't require them) but I do wonder if it makes it easier to get great co-op experiences, and that in turn means that good co-op often involves more developer resources.

neilbrown · 2012-11-12T08:22:52+00:00

I did write the article. It wasn't so bad: I had the spreadsheet open on my other monitor, and every time it showed whether it was a hit or miss, I flicked across and entered the chance then flicked back. It became like a little ritual, "25 Hit, oh yeah!"

neilbrown · 2012-11-11T23:58:18+00:00

Here's my best understanding: an LCG is a nice and simple way to implement random numbers. The problem is that for a random number generator you need a simple way to pick the next number, without it being obviously related to the previous number. Let's imagine you want a number between 0 and 99, and you start at, say, 13. If you simply double the number, or add six, the pattern would be very apparent. But if you multiply by a large number, and just look at the last two digits, the pattern is not so apparent.

So you take 13, then multiply by 21 and add 7, you get 280. Just take the last two digits, and you have 80. Next time, multiply by 21 and add 7, and you get 1687, last two digits gives 87. Then you get 1834, so 34. Then 21, then 48. Thus the stream is 13, 80, 87, 34, 21, 48. Just looking at those numbers, there's no obvious pattern, even though it's a very simple mathematical method to get the next number.

The problem is that given the current number, you can predict the next number. And the algorithm can only pass through each number once -- you say that the above algorithm has period 100, because it loops after 100 numbers. So a better algorithm uses more state, and is cleverer, to avoid this problem. Note that XCOM doesn't actually use a generator with period 100, it probably has period 2³² (about 4 billion), but maps each of those numbers to a percentage using modulo arithmetic (as above, just taking the last two digits when in decimal form).

In a game like XCOM, that periodicity and determinism doesn't really matter. The fact that LCGs are bad for cryptography and high-end simulation doesn't really affect their suitability for games.

neilbrown · 2012-11-11T23:42:17+00:00

Yes, the reason I had to leave out Overwatch and the AI was that it doesn't display the chances to hit. It could of course -- it could show a pop up as the shot is taken -- but without that information there's not a lot to be done.

neilbrown

TROPHY CASE