The Insider News

Kent Beck[^]:

My intuition and experience is that long test names are good and short function names are good, all else being equal. But why? ... One constraint common to test naming and function naming is that the names should be chosen to optimize readability and comprehension. Your team will invest far more reading names than writing them. This doesn't mean that long names are necessarily good, but that the focus should be on the reader's experience, not the writer's.

CITEworld[^]:

Yesterday Microsoft reported flat Windows revenue from the year before, despite an unprecedented drop in PC sales.... There are several factors that made this possible. As investor relations chief Chris Suh put it on the earnings call, "Non-OEM revenue grew 40% this quarter, driven by sales of Surface and continued double digit growth in volume licensing." So how much did Surface help Microsoft's Windows revenue this quarter? Let's do a rough back-of-the-envelope estimate.

The Official Lookout Blog[^]:

Lookout has discovered BadNews, a new malware family, in 32 apps across four different developer accounts in Google Play. According to Google Play statistics, the combined affected applications have been downloaded between 2,000,000 – 9,000,000 times. We notified Google and they promptly removed all apps and suspended the associated developer accounts pending further investigation. All Lookout users are protected against this threat. BadNews masquerades as an innocent, if somewhat aggressive advertising network. This is one of the first times that we’ve seen a malicious distribution network clearly posing as an ad network.

Marco.org[^]:

No matter what you make or how much you charge, some people will find things to complain about. If you drop your app’s price all the way down to free, people will still complain — just not about the price. They’ll move on to the features, the implementation, the design, the updates, the way you look, or what kind of dog you have. They’ll complain about every facet of your app, and then they’ll complain about unrelated topics just to pile on.

Betabeat[^]:

Is booze for programmers like spinach for Popeye? The Ballmer Peak, a reference to Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, holds that imbibing alcohol improves cognitive ability, up to a point–a variation of the Yerkes-Dodson law, which shows a correlation between arousal and performance. Anecdotal evidence suggests that optimal programming occurs about two beers in. But what sayeth science?

marcusoft.net[^]:

What am I optimizing for when I write my code today? Change will always come. I know that from the outset. "I will change something in that spec during the 25 years the system will live". How do I try to handle that? Do I precieve change as a risk or an enabler? Being able to change fast is a business advantage and a way to manage risk. How do I make my code being easy to change? What kind of documentation do I need in a system that I'm going to change a lot?

Smashing Coding[^]:

Static typing is great because it keeps you out of trouble. Dynamic typing is great because it gets out of your way and lets you get your work done faster. The debate between strongly and dynamically typed languages rages on, but understanding the issue starts with weak typing and languages such as C.

Nettuts+[^]:

Today, most programming languages can use reflection. Statically typed languages, such as Java, have little to no problems with reflection. What I find interesting, however, is that any dynamically-typed language (like PHP or Ruby) is heavily based on reflection. Without the concept of reflection, duck-typing would most likely be impossible to implement. When you send one object to another (a parameter, for example), the receiving object has no way of knowing the structure and type of that object. All it can do is use reflection to identify the methods that can and cannot be called on the received object.

IBM[^]:

Good ideas in programming languages persist and spread to other languages, permeating them over time. Thus, unsurprisingly, the Java.next languages — Groovy, Scala, and Clojure — share many common features. In this and upcoming Java.next installments, I explore how the convergence of function manifests in the syntax of each. I start with a feature — the ability to overload operators — that makes up for a longstanding deficiency in the Java language.

Florian Kugler[^]:

Apple's Interface Builder is supposed to assist you with several important tasks in the process of creating user interfaces: Laying out views, Wiring up outlets and actions, Creating segues between view controllers (with storyboards). After working on a fairly complex iPad app for the last six months together with Chris Eidhof, my personal bottom line for Interface Builder doesn't look too positive with regard to these tasks. In fact, I'm willing to try out abandoning Interface Builder alltogether for the next project. This may sound pretty radical, but let me walk you through my thought process.

John Graham-Cumming[^]:

Last February myself, Professor Darrel Ince and Professor Les Hatton had a paper published in Nature arguing for openness in the code used for scientific papers.... Recently, an important paper in economics has been in the news because its conclusions turn out to be inaccurate for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is a programming error using the popular Microsoft Excel program. This error, in an unreleased spreadsheet, highlights just how easy it is to make a mistake in a 'simple' program and how closed programs make reproducing results difficult.

Ars Technica[^]:

One of the best things about travelling to shows like PAX East and the Game Developers Conference is the chance to check out titles from off-the-beaten-path, independent developers. While shows like E3 are overwhelmed by the presence of multi-million dollar booths from huge publishers, the early-in-the-year shows make a point of highlighting some of the most original and promising game ideas from game makers without big contracts or salaried positions behind them. Freed from the financial responsibilities of the major AAA publishers, these are the titles that are most likely to truly break new ground in gameplay, aesthetics, and subject matter.