I've been drawing a sequence diagram of a module recently, while reverse engineering.
I encountered a control statement, and it is like,
if (func_A() == True)
{
DoSomeThing();
}
else
{
DoSomeThingElse();
}
The problem is how to draw the condition?
As I mentioned, It is reverse engineering. The code cannot be modified now.
I drew two diagrams, and I don't know which way is right,
The first one is this, I think it's wrong because it doesn't show the function call as a message from A to B.
This is the second, It shows a message func_A.
What do you think about to do this right?
To complete the other answer there is anyway a problem in the second proposal because we do not know if in [func_A() == True] you reuse the value return by the previous call or you do a second call, to avoid that add the explicit return in your diagram :
Out of that do you know the activities ? A sequence diagram is "just" an interaction while an activity is a behavior and can be more adapted :
It depends. If func_A is an operation defined in Object2 the second representation would be correct. The first does not tell where the operation is defined. Most likely (!) one would interpret func_A as an operation local to ObjectA which your code seems to say. (Btw. you have two completely different object sets AB vs. 12 in your examples.) But that is uncertain. So the 2nd variant is more explicit (and correct).
In any case I advise to not overdo SDs with fragments as "graphical programming" doesn't make things easier to read (my practical experience). It's excellent to show message flows in various collaborations. But when it comes to conditions it's getting messy very soon. A better way is to create different sub-diagrams or even use pseudo code if there are too nested if conditions. In many cases such if clauses are a good fit for state machines.
This might be frivolous question, so please have understanding for my poor soul.
After reading this article about Intelligent Design sort (http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/intelligentdesignsort.html) which is in no way made to be serious in any way, I started wondering whether this could be possible.
An excerpt from article says:
The probability of the original input list being in the exact order it's in is 1/(n!). There is such a small likelihood of this that it's clearly absurd to say that this happened by chance, so it must have been consciously put in that order by an intelligent Sorter.
Let's for a second forget about intelligent Sorter, and think about possibility that random occurrences of members in array are in some way sorted. Our algorithm should determine the pattern without changing array's structure.
Is there any way to do this? Speed is not a requirement.
The implementation is very easy actually. The entire point of the article is that you don't actually sort anything. In other words, a correct implementation is a simple NOP. As my preferred language is Java, I'll show a simple in-place implementation in Java as a lambda function:
list->{}
Funny article, I had a good laugh.
If the only thing you're interested in is that whether your List is sorted, then you could simply keep an internal sorted flag (defaulted to true for an empty list) and override your add() method to check if the element you're adding fits the ordering of the List - that is, compare it to the adjacent elements and setting the sorted flag appropriately.
Recently I tried to explain some poorly designed code to my project manager. All of the manager classes are singletons ("and that's why I can't easily change this") and the code uses event dispatching everywhere that a function call would have sufficed ("and that's why it's so hard to debug"). Sadly it just came out as a fumbling mess of English.
Whats the most difficult thing you've had to convey to a non-technical person as a programmer? Did you find any analogies or ways of explaining that made it clearer?
Thread Synchronization and Dead-Locking.
Spending time on design, and spending time on refactoring.
Refactoring produces no client-visible work at all, which makes it the hardest thing in the project to justify working on.
As a second "not client-visible" problem, unit testing.
I was asked how the internet worked - I responded with "SYN, ACK, ACK". Keep forgetting it's SYN, SYN-ACK, ACK..
(source: inetdaemon.com)
My most difficult question began innocently enough: my girlfriend asked how text is rendered in Firefox. I answered simply with something along the lines of "rendering engine, Gecko, HTML parser, blah blah blah."
Then it went downhill. "Well how does Gecko know what to display then?"
It spiraled from there quite literally down to the graphics drivers, operating system, compilers, hardware archiectures, and the raw 1s and 0s. I not only realized there were significant gaps in my own knowledge of the layering hierarchy, but also how, in the end, I had left her (and me!) more confused than when I began.
I should've initially answered "turtles all the way down" and stuck with that. :P
I had a fun case of trying to explain why a program wasn't behaving as expected when some records in a database had empty strings and some were NULL. I think their head just about exploded when I told them empty string is just a string with 0 bytes in it while NULL means unknown value and so you can't actually compare it to anything.
Afterward I had one nasty headache.
1.) SQL: Thinking in sets, rather than procedurally (it's hard enough for us programmers to grasp!).
2.) ...and here's a great example of demystifing technical concepts:
How I explained REST to my wife
A lot of statements starting with "It's because in Oracle, ..." come to my mind.
The biggest hurdles are around "technological debt", especially about how the architecture was correct for this version but needs to be changed for next version. This is similar to the problem of explaining "prototype versus production" and "version 1.0 versus version 2.0".
Worst mistake I ever made was doing a UI mockup in NeXT steps UI Builder. It looked exactly like the end product would look and had some behaviour. Trying to explain that there was 6 months of work remaining after that was very difficult.
How recursion works...
Why code like this is bad:
private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
System.Threading.ThreadStart start =
new System.Threading.ThreadStart(SomeFunction);
System.Threading.Thread thread = new System.Threading.Thread(start);
_SomeFunctionFinished = false;
thread.Start();
while (!_SomeFunctionFinished)
{
System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(1000);
}
// do something else that can only be done after SomeFunction() is finished
}
private bool _SomeFunctionFinished;
private void SomeFunction()
{
// do some elaborate $##%#
_SomeFunctionFinished = true;
}
Update: what this code should be:
private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
SomeFunction();
// do something else that can only be done after SomeFunction() is finished
}
private void SomeFunction()
{
// do some elaborate $##%#
}
The importance of unit tests.
"Adding a new programmer a month to this late task will make it ship later. Never mind, read this book." (The Mythical Man-Month.) Managers still don't quite get it.
The concept of recursion - some people get it really hard.
I sometimes really have hard time explaining the concept of covariance/contravariance and the problems related to them to fellow programmers.
Convincing a friend that the Facebook application I developed really doesn't store her personal data (e.g. name) even though still displays it.
Why it'll take another four weeks to put this app into production. After all, it only took a week to do the rapid prototype. It "works" (or at least looks like it does) so I should be pretty much finished, shouldn't I?
Explanations that involve security, code quality (maintainability), normalized DB schemas, testing, etc. usually come off as a list of abstractions that don't have any visible effect on the app, so it's hard to explain what they really contribute to the project and why they're necessary. Sometimes analogies can only take you so far.
C pointers
*i
&i
Avoiding Dead-Locking in a multi-threaded environment.
I cleared confusion by explaining it visually on a white-board, drawing out two parallel lines and showing what happens when the reach the same points at the same time.
Also role-playing two threads with the person I was explaining it to, and using physical objects (book, coffee mug, etc) to show what happens when we both try to use something at once.
There's really no right or wrong answer-proper for this... it's all experiences.
The hardest thing I have had to explain to a non-tech person was why he couldn't get to his website when traveling abroad but his family member that lived there (with a totally different provider) could get to it. Somehow, "Fail in Finland" wasn't good enough.
The most difficult concepts to explain to people I would label programmers as opposed to developers are some of the most core paradigms of object orientated design. Most specifically abstraction, encapsulation and the king, polymorphism and how to use them correctly.
Expanding on that is the level of complexity of explaining what Inversion of Control is and why it is an absolute need and not just extra layers of code that doesn't do anything.
I was going to comment on Mikael's post, that some people just take the sequential programming and unfortunately just stay with that.
But that really means: two seriously hard to explain concepts:
monads in haskell (usually starting with: "That's like a function that returns a function that does what you really wanted to do, but ...")
deferreds in twisted/python ("That's like... ehhh... Just use it for a year or so and you'll get it" ;) )
Trying to explain why code was executed sequentially at all. Seemingly this is not at all intuitive for some non-programmers (i.e. my girlfriend).
Why you do not need character correct index handling in most cases when you use UTF-8 strings.
It's hard to explain why most software has bugs. Many non-technical people have no idea how complex software is, and how easy it is to overlook unexpected conditions. They think we are just too lazy to fix stuff that we know is broken.
There are 10 different types of people in the world.
The people who understand Binary and the people who dont....
To put it plainly, why development is the most difficult concept ever exposed to man kind. Not related to any programming language, but in general. And no I am not trying to provide myself or you with an ego boost, the only real limitations to this field is your mind.
Why? We don't work with constants and there are no boundaries, the only reason an AI that thinks like a human being doesn't exist yet is due to our own limitations. All other aspects need to adhere to some sort of law, development doesn't care about the laws of physics or any law for that matter hence the term development... evolution.
I was thinking to implement MD5 as a code kata and wanted to use BDD to drive the design (I am a BDD newb).
However, the only test I can think of starting with is to pass in an empty string, and the simplest thing that will work is embedding the hash in my program and returning that.
The logical extension of this is that I end up embedding the hash in my solution for every test and switching on the input to decide what to return. Which of course will not result in a working MD5 program.
One of my difficulties is that there should only be one public function:
public static string MD5(input byte[])
And I don't see how to test the internals.
Is my approach completely flawed or is MD5 unsuitable for BDD?
I believe you chose a pretty hard exercise for a BDD code-kata. The thing about code-kata, or what I've understood about it so far, is that you somehow have to see the problem in small incremental steps, so that you can perform these steps in red, green, refactor iterations.
For example, an exercise of finding an element position inside an array, might be like this:
If array is empty, then position is 0, no matter the needle element
Write test. Implementation. Refactor
If array is not empty, and element does not exist, position is -1
Write test. Implementation. Refactor
If array is not empty, and element is the first in list, position is 1
Write test. Implementation. Refactor
I don't really see how to break the MD5 algorithm in that kind of steps. But that may be because I'm not really an algorithm guy. If you better understand the steps involved in the MD5 algorithm, then you may have better chances.
It depends on what you mean with unsuitable... :-) It is suitable if you want to document a few examples that describes your implementation. It should also be possible to have the algorithm emerge from your specifciation if you add one more character for each test.
By just adding a switch statement you're just trying to "cheat the system". Using BDD/TDD does not mean you have to implement stupid things. Also the fact that you have hardcoded hash values as well as a switch statement in your code are clear code smells and should be refactored and removed. That is how your algorithm should emerge because when you see the hard coded values you first remove them (by calculating the value) and then you see that they are all the same so you remove the switch statement.
Also if your question is about finding good katas I would recommend lokking in the Kata catalogue.
This question already has answers here:
Closed 13 years ago.
Possible Duplicates:
Formatting of if Statements
Is there a best coding style for identations (same line, next line)?
Best way to code stackoverflow style 'questions' / 'tags' rollover buttons
public void Method {
}
or
public void Method
{
}
Besides personal preference is there any benefit of one style over another? I used to swear by the second method though now use the first style for work and personal projects.
By readability I mean imagine code in those methods - if/else etc...
Google C++ Style Guide suggests
Return type on the same line as function name, parameters on the same line if they fit.
Functions look like this:
ReturnType ClassName::FunctionName(Type par_name1, Type par_name2) {
DoSomething();
...
}
WebKit Coding Style Guidelines suggests
Function definitions: place each brace on its own line.
Right:
int main()
{
...
}
Wrong:
int main() {
...
}
They suggest braces-on-same-line for everything else, though.
GNU Coding Standards suggests
It is important to put the open-brace that starts the body of a C function in column one, so that they will start a defun. Several tools look for open-braces in column one to find the beginnings of C functions. These tools will not work on code not formatted that way.
Avoid putting open-brace, open-parenthesis or open-bracket in column one when they are inside a function, so that they won't start a defun. The open-brace that starts a struct body can go in column one if you find it useful to treat that definition as a defun.
It is also important for function definitions to start the name of the function in column one. This helps people to search for function definitions, and may also help certain tools recognize them. Thus, using Standard C syntax, the format is this:
static char *
concat (char *s1, char *s2)
{
...
}
or, if you want to use traditional C syntax, format the definition like this:
static char *
concat (s1, s2) /* Name starts in column one here */
char *s1, *s2;
{ /* Open brace in column one here */
...
}
As you can see, everybody has their own opinions. Personally, I prefer the Perl-ish braces-on-same-line-except-for-else, but as long as everybody working on the code can cooperate, it really doesn't matter.
I think it is completely subjective, however, I think it is important to establish code standards for your team and have everyone use the same style. That being said I like the second one (and have made my team use it) because it seems easier to read when it is not your code.
In the old days we used to use the first style (K & R style) because screens were smaller and code was often printed onto this stuff called paper.
These days we have big screen and the second method (ANSI style) makes it easier to see if your brackets match up.
See HERE and HERE for more information.
First one is smaller in terms of number of lines (maybe that is why development -Java- books tend to use that syntax)
Second one is, IMHO easier to read as you always have two aligned brackets.
Anyway both of them are widely used, it's a matter of your personal preferences.
I use the if statement as something to reason on in this highly emotive subject.
if (cond) {
//code
}
by just asking what does the else statement look like? The logical extension of the above is:-
if (cond) {
//code
} else {
//more code
}
Is that readable? I don't think so and its just plain ugly too.
More lines is != less readable. Hence I'd go with your latter option.
Personally I find the second one more readable (aligned curlys).
Its always easiest for a team to go with the defaults, and since Visual Studio and I agree on this, thats my argument. ;-)
Your lines of code count will be considerably less with the first option. :)