The POG Programmers Containment Thread

[Mark_K]

Originally Posted by Chips Ahoy

main()
{
char q=34;
char n=10;
char *a="main() {char q=34,n=10,*a=%c%s%c; printf(a,q,a,q,n);}%c";
printf(a,q,a,q,n);
}

looks like it prints itself.

Hehe, pretty cool eh?

I remember this making the rounds when I was in school. So I figured it would fit well in a POG programming thread.

[Chips Ahoy]

[clowntable]

Originally Posted by Mark_K

What does this code do?

Looks like a Quine

[CPFB]

I got my ruby 1.9.2 installed yesterday. Apparently I needed to install readline to get rvm to work correctly.

I like playing with my shiny new 1.9.2 and rails 3 so far!

Any other rubyists here besides Neil?

[well named]

I've always meant to play around with that but I've never gotten to it.

In other news, why does our product have 5 different enumerations for "Data Type" that all have basically the same types with one slight variation per, that don't map

aarrrrgggg

[Zurvan]

Originally Posted by well named

In other news, why does our product have 5 different enumerations for "Data Type" that all have basically the same types with one slight variation per, that don't map

lol

The site I work on started out as a basic task list, but has since morphed to a far more involved product, which has a task list feature. As a result of this, there are a number of database tables that are named based on either

a) The old setup
b) Their function (ie, "groups" to indicate a set of data that a number of people share, but referred to as workspaces in the product)

They've obviously been adding features at an incredible rate for the last year, which has led to a bunch of features that share the name of a database table but perform a different function. Like, groups in the sense of permission groups, which obviously can't use the database table group

So the product is a basically a giant comedy of conflicting names, things with a database table of that name but that aren't actually related. It took about 6 months for me to get comfortable with all the mappings, and I still run in to problems.

And, since this is written in CakePHP, table names automatically map to class names, so we can't even abstract away the confusion.

[well named]

sounds cool. I just figured out that my current issue is basically equivalent to doing the old english->japanese->english translation loop between data types

[Mark_K]

Anyone ever enter the POTM (Programmer of the Month) contests held over the years?

I remember entering a few of them. The problems were really interesting. None really involved a lot of code... They mostly involved developing unique search heuristics and algorithms. Sadly the guy running it got burned out and stopped.

The POTM website

Check out the "Previous contests" section for some of the cool challenges.

[Senor Cardgage]

I'm in my second year of my master's in mathematics. My "programming" experience consists of moderate amounts of MATLAB, SAS, Maple, Mathematica, etc.

This semester, I'm going to be re-learning MATLAB (it's been a while) and picking up Python to do thesis-related stuff. Soooo I guess it's time to start posting in here.

[clowntable]

Originally Posted by CPFB

I got my ruby 1.9.2 installed yesterday. Apparently I needed to install readline to get rvm to work correctly.

I like playing with my shiny new 1.9.2 and rails 3 so far!

Any other rubyists here besides Neil?

I think Ruby is a pretty elegant language, does that count?

This semester, I'm going to be re-learning MATLAB (it's been a while) and picking up Python to do thesis-related stuff. Soooo I guess it's time to start posting in here.

Obvious answers first: learn Python 2.x to be on the safe side. If you want to do any website building stuff check out http://www.djangoproject.com/ it's a web framework and there's free+good documentation on the site http://www.djangobook.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Pp4YFSRsZ

[Madtown]

Originally Posted by Madtown

Sorry to just pop in and share a story, but I feel I must because I am so flipping baffled sometimes. I work for a non-profit that frequently works with both public/governmental organizations, and with large and small private companies and individual contractors. Today we had some major employees from a decent-sized company to whom we contract a lot of work suggest that, rather than creating a database for a modest-sized research and analysis project... that we should just cram it into a big Word document. This project will require frequent updates, will be used to search and query summaries and analysis of past work based on several different fields depending on the information needed, and will be used by ourselves and at least three different offices of the other company.

I was the sole objector. "How about an Access database?" I say. Despite zero experience with Access*, I will likely now be the person that creates this database structure (not data input through, that's what interns are for). I'm perfectly fine with taking it on -- it'll be a relatively easy project that will likely impress more than it should -- but how is it that I was the only one to suggest this? Moreover, how is it that neither we nor they have an IT developer whose job it is to do such things?

* To be fair, I did take a few programming classes in college and have done more than my fair share dicking about with MySQL databases in personal/amateur web development, and my co-workers are aware of this. Still, I highly doubt that factored whatsoever into my hiring, as my job has had approximately zero to do with database creation to date.

What I'm getting at is that I'm consistently stunned by the level of incompetency and inefficiency displayed by both public and private organizations on, like, a daily basis. I shouldn't be surprised anymore, but I always am!

Just wanted to come back and share an update.

After much discussion and exploration of other options, my boss realized that 1) a giant Word document sucks 2) an Access database sucks 3) she didn't want to go through the red-tape of getting real IT resources involved for any of the more ambitious options, and 4) while we were gathering the existing data to save money (interns are cheap), the other company is going to be responsible for all future updates and this whole thing is really their responsibility in a legal sense anyway. Therefore we kicked the whole thing back over to them. They elected to stick with the big Word document, and I washed my hands of the whole thing.

I apologize for the vagaries, but I'll also note that the issue at hand isn't unique to us -- they (and firms like them) really should have a more robust tool for handling this type of information, because it appears likely that the issue we're addressing is going to become quite widespread and common in the future of this field.

But hey, why invest some time and money now to build out a robust solution that you could widely apply when you can just have an intern make a giant Word document?

[Zurvan]

Bump because I've been working on the same bug since Thursday afternoon, I still haven't solved it, and I'm about 99% sure that if the guy who had setup this section of the app had ever heard of database normalization, I wouldn't be having this problem.

**** repeating data, **** highly coupled code, **** impenetrable naming schemes, **** copy/paste code

RAGE

[clowntable]

You must be working with PHP

[Zurvan]

Yes, bad code and terrible data design are the sole domain of PHP. If only we wrote it in python, then everything would be perfect

[wahoopride]

meh
i can't relate to real programming issues