DevTopics » Development

Microsoft Popfly Has Been Swatted

timm — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:59:52 +0000

Microsoft Popfly is a set of online visual tools for novice programmers and end-users to build Web pages, applications and games. This was Microsoft’s attempt to bring programming to the masses, similar to Hypercard on the Macintosh, or the original Visual Basic on Windows before it became a real (complicated) object-oriented language under .NET.

But this fly lived for only two years. Microsoft has just announced that on August 24, 2009, the Popfly service will be discontinued and all sites, references, and resources will be taken down. At that time, access to your Popfly account, including any games and mashups that you have created, will be discontinued.

However, Microsoft says it is “still very much dedicated to helping you express your creativity and pursuing a path to software development” and thus offers you some alternatives. If you’re interested in refining your skills in Web applications, visit Microsoft Web Platform Installer. For those interested in programming on the Xbox, then visit Microsoft XNA or Microsoft Kodu. And for those who are interested in Windows programming, visit Microsoft Express.

Unfortunately, any investment you have made in the Microsoft Popfly development platform has been a waste of time. The lesson here is that proprietary development environments are a risky bet, even when backed by a major company such as Microsoft.

Popfly Website

P.S. – Speaking of flies, did you see Ninja President Obama kill a fly during a national TV interview?

Computer Programming is Fun

timm — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 14:05:51 +0000

Grok2 has highlighted an old but excellent essay about why computer programming is fun. This quote is from one of our industry’s groundbreaking books, The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. First published in 1974, the book posited the computer law that “adding programmers to a late project makes it later.”

Brooks’ innocent but insightful comments about his delight in programming the green-screen dumb-terminal IBM OS/360 is even more relevant in today’s world of high-resolution dynamic graphical displays and the global reach of Web applications. The players have changed, the technology has certainly changed, but the joy of computer programming endures.

From The Mythical Man-Month:

Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?

First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God’s delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.

Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child’s first clay pencil holder "for Daddy’s office."

Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.

Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the non-repeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (…)

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separately from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.

Extreme Programming Taken to the Extreme

timm — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 13:05:01 +0000

You know it’s time to find a new job when your boss buys you one of these chairs:

Key Features:

Fully unit-tested in our ego-free ergonomics lab
Essential office furniture for any eXtreme XP Pair (XXPP)
Fully adjustable via individual or pair control
Available with optional anti-footsie device
Includes matching T-shirts that say “<- I’m with stupid”

See the chair at Cenqua PairOn

25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors

timm — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:12:04 +0000

Experts from more than 30 U.S. and international cyber-security organizations jointly released a consensus list of the 25 most dangerous programming errors that lead to security bugs and cyber-crime.

The impact of these programming errors is significant. Just two of these errors resulted in more than 1.5 million website security breaches during 2008. These breaches allowed malicious software to take control of the computers that visited those web sites, turning their computers into zombies that committed further cyber-crimes.

Shockingly, most programmers do not understand or look for these errors. Colleges rarely teach programming students how to avoid these errors. And most software companies don’t explicitly test for these errors before releasing their products.

Background

The organizations that helped produce this list include Microsoft, Symantec, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), National Security Agency (NSA), University of California at Davis, and Purdue University. MITRE and SANS Institute managed the Top 25 Errors initiative.

What was interesting about the process was how quickly the experts came to agreement in spite of some heated discussion. “There appears to be broad agreement on the programming errors,” says SANS Director, Mason Brown. “Now it is time to fix them. First we need to make sure every programmer knows how to write code that is free of the Top 25 errors, and then we need to make sure every programming team has processes in place to find, fix, or avoid these problems and has the tools needed to verify their code is as free of these errors as automated tools can verify.”

Benefits

The security experts hope that releasing this information will result in the following key improvements in the software industry:

Users will have access to much safer software.
Programmers will have tools to measure the security of the software they are developing.
Colleges will teach more secure coding practices.
Companies will produce more secure software products.

“The publication of a list of programming errors that enable cyber espionage and cyber crime is an important first step in managing the vulnerability of our networks and technology,” said Tony Sager, National Security Agency (NSA). “There needs to be a move away from reacting to thousands of individual vulnerabilities, and to focus instead on a relatively small number of software flaws that allow vulnerabilities to occur, each with a general root cause. Such a list allows the targeting of improvements in software development practices, tools, and requirements to manage these problems earlier in the life cycle, where they can be solved on a large scale and cost-effectively.”

Most Dangerous Programming Errors

Here are the top 25 most dangerous programming errors divided into three categories:

Insecure Interaction Between Components

Improper Input Validation
Improper Encoding or Escaping of Output
Failure to Preserve SQL Query Structure (aka ‘SQL Injection’)
Failure to Preserve Web Page Structure (aka ‘Cross-site Scripting’)
Failure to Preserve OS Command Structure (aka ‘OS Command Injection’)
Cleartext Transmission of Sensitive Information
Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
Race Condition
Error Message Information Leak

Risky Resource Management

Failure to Constrain Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer
External Control of Critical State Data
External Control of File Name or Path
Untrusted Search Path
Failure to Control Generation of Code (aka ‘Code Injection’)
Download of Code Without Integrity Check
Improper Resource Shutdown or Release
Improper Initialization
Incorrect Calculation

Porous Defenses

Improper Access Control (Authorization)
Use of a Broken or Risky Cryptographic Algorithm
Hard-Coded Password
Insecure Permission Assignment for Critical Resource
Use of Insufficiently Random Values
Execution with Unnecessary Privileges
Client-Side Enforcement of Server-Side Security

Read about these errors in detail at the SANS Institute.

Programmer’s Creed

timm — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:49:05 +0000

A creed is a statement of belief or faith often recited as part of a religious service or organizational gathering. The word “creed” derives from the Latin credo (I believe) or credimus (we believe). Perhaps the oldest is Apostle’s Creed cited in Christianity. However, the Rifleman’s Creed is arguably the most famous, made popular by the Stanley Kubrick war movie “Full Metal Jacket” (warning: language). This has inspired me (with tongue planted firmly in cheek) to write a creed for our noble profession of software development.

Following is the Programmer’s Creed:

This is my program. There are many programs like it but this one is mine. My program is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. Without me, my program is useless. Without my program, I am useless. I must code my program true. I must code better than my competition who is trying to beat me. I must release my program before he releases his. I will…

My program and I know that what counts in this market is not the number of versions we release, the reach of our marketing, nor the downloads we get. We know that it is the satisfied customers that count. We will satisfy…

My program is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weakness, its strength, its architecture, its data format, its components and its plug-ins. I will keep my program built and ready, even as I am ready. We will become part of each other. We will…

Before Zod I swear this creed. My program and I are the leaders of our market. We are the masters of our competition. We are the saviors of our customers. So be it, until victory is ours and there are no more bugs, only happy users.

More Programmer Creeds on the Web

We the unwilling, led by the unknowing,
have done so much with so little for so long,
that now we are qualified to do everything with nothing. (source)

Programmer’s Creed from Maryland ColdFusion User’s Group

Programmer’s Creed: The Mark of Quality from SecretGeek (a cynical view)

Programmer’s Creed from Virginia Tech

Programmer Productivity: The "Tenfinity Factor"

timm — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:35:44 +0000

It’s widely accepted in the software industry that some programmers are much more productive than others. Many experts cite an order-of-magnitude productivity difference between the “best” and “average” programmers.

This “factor of 10″ difference is so commonly referenced that “10X Software Development” is the name of the blog by development productivity guru Steve McConnell, who says:

Numerous studies have found 10:1 differences in productivity and quality among individuals and even among teams. The original study that found huge variations in individual programming productivity was conducted in the late 1960s by Sackman, Erikson, and Grant. They studied professional programmers with an average of 7 years’ experience and found that the ratio of initial coding time between the best and worst programmers was about 20 to 1; the ratio of debugging times over 25 to 1; of program size 5 to 1; and of program execution speed about 10 to 1. They found no relationship between a programmer’s amount of experience and code quality or productivity.

Some other noteworthy comments on the subject:

“The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability.” –Randall E. Stross

“A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer.” –Bill Gates

“90% of the code is written by 10% of the programmers.” –Robert C. Martin

But it’s not just that some programmers work faster; some programmers can do things that few other programmers can do. These are your visionaries and trailblazers. I call this sometimes-10X/sometimes-infinite advantage: The “Tenfinity Factor.”

In my 25-year programming career, which includes 6 software companies I started, I’ve had the pleasure to manage and work with many programmers offering a wide range of skills. Specifically in our venture-backed company during the dot-com boom, though I didn’t write much code, I managed a department of 27 technical people that included some of the best programmers available in a Midwest town like Cincinnati. In my experience, the tenfinity factor is definitely real.

This wide productivity gap results in five major classes of computer programmers:

1. Visionary/Artist Programmer

The Visionary Programmer is a rare breed that can capture lightning in a bottle and produce code that 99.9% of others cannot. These inventors create new applications and paradigms that drive innovation in the software industry. Napster, Netscape, and the World Wide Web are all inventions from visionary programmers. For these people, software is more art than science. Speed and quality are not always the best, but great fortunes are made on the backs of these wizards. Most development shops can afford only a single visionary programmer, which is often the company’s technical founder or CTO.

2. Trailblazer Programmer

The Trailblazer Programmer takes a good idea and runs with it. These are the people who most often create the prototypes that ultimately become useful products. Trailblazers can produce in a day what takes most programmers weeks or months. Trailblazers are always experimenting with new tools and technologies, constantly learning and searching for ways to increase productivity, and typically serve as mentors and teachers to other programmers. You will often find a trailblazer coding away late at night when everyone else has left the office. Though these professionals tend to be expensive, every successful development shop needs at least one or two trailblazers.

3. Workhorse Programmer

The Workhorse Programmer is the backbone of any productive development shop. These people are not particularly innovative, but they are highly productive and reliable. Give a workhorse programmer a good set of specs and the right tools, and they will often deliver on time and within budget.

4. Drone Programmer

Filling the fat in a true bell curve, many programmers are “drones” who work 9-5 to collect a paycheck. These people shy away from new technology, avoid learning new things, and likely will not be reading this article. Most large development shops are full of drones because management fails to realize that more expensive programmers are actually cheaper.

5. Idiot Programmer

Every village has its idiot, and software development is no exception. Programming requires abstract and logical thinking, yet some right-brained people are lured to programming in search of a good salary. Idiot Programmers often struggle with the simplest of algorithms, constantly miss deadlines and fail to make much progress. The sad thing is these are often wonderful people, but simply in the wrong job.

So do you believe in the tenfinity factor? What have you seen on the job?

Best Programming Jokes

timm — Tue, 06 May 2008 17:43:39 +0000

How can you tell when a programmer has had sex?
When he’s washing the pepper spray out of his eyes.

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Two bytes meet. The first byte asks, “Are you ill?”
The second byte replies, “No, just feeling a bit off.”

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Eight bytes walk into a bar. The bartender asks, “Can I get you anything?”

“Yeah,” reply the bytes. “Make us a double.”

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Q. How did the programmer die in the shower?
A. He read the shampoo bottle instructions: Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

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How many programers dose it take to change a light bulb?
None – It’s a hardare problem

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Why do programmers always mix up Halloween and Christmas?
Because Oct 31 equals Dec 25.

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There are only 10 kinds of people in this world: those who know binary and those who don’t.

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A programmer walks to the butcher shop and buys a kilo of meat. An hour later he comes back upset that the butcher shortchanged him by 24 grams.

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“Knock, knock.”
“Who’s there?”
very long pause….
“Java.”

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Programming is 10% science, 20% ingenuity, and 70% getting the ingenuity to work with the science.

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Programming is like sex:
One mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life.

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A man is smoking a cigarette and blowing smoke rings into the air. His girlfriend becomes irritated with the smoke and says, “Can’t you see the warning on the cigarette pack? Smoking is hazardous to your health!”

To which the man replies, “I am a programmer. We don’t worry about warnings; we only worry about errors.”

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There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies, and benchmarks.

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A programmer is walking along a beach and finds a lamp. He rubs the lamp, and a genie appears. “I am the most powerful genie in the world. I can grant you any wish, but only one wish.”

The programmer pulls out a map, points to it and says, “I’d want peace in the Middle East.”

The genie responds, “Gee, I don’t know. Those people have been fighting for millenia. I can do just about anything, but this is likely beyond my limits.”

The programmer then says, “Well, I am a programmer, and my programs have lots of users. Please make all my users satisfied with my software and let them ask for sensible changes.”

At which point the genie responds, “Um, let me see that map again.”

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All programmers are playwrights, and all computers are lousy actors.

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Have you heard about the new Cray super computer? It’s so fast, it executes an infinite loop in 6 seconds.

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The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

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“I just saw my life flash before my eyes and all I could see was a close tag…”

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The computer is mightier than the pen, the sword, and usually, the programmer.

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Debugging: Removing the needles from the haystack.

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Two strings walk into a bar and sit down. The bartender says, “So what’ll it be?”

The first string says, “I think I’ll have a beer quag fulk boorg jdk^CjfdLk jk3s d#f67howe%^U r89nvy~~owmc63^Dz x.xvcu”

“Please excuse my friend,” the second string says, “He isn’t null-terminated.”

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From the Random Shack Data Processing Dictionary:

Endless Loop: n., see Loop, Endless.
Loop, Endless: n., see Endless Loop.

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The three most dangerous things in the world are a programmer with a soldering iron, a hardware engineer with a software patch, and a user with an idea. – The Wizardry Compiled by Rick Cook

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One hundred little bugs in the code
One hundred little bugs.
Fix a bug, link the fix in,
One hundred little bugs in the code.

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A computer science student is studying under a tree and another pulls up on a flashy new bike. The first student asks, “Where’d you get that?”

The student on the bike replies, “While I was studying outside, a beautiful girl pulled up on her bike. She took off all her clothes and said, ‘You can have anything you want’.”

The first student responds, “Good choice! Her clothes probably wouldn’t have fit you.”

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CIA – Computer Industry Acronyms

CD-ROM: Consumer Device, Rendered Obsolete in Months
PCMCIA: People Can’t Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms
ISDN: It Still Does Nothing
SCSI: System Can’t See It
MIPS: Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed
DOS: Defunct Operating System
WINDOWS: Will Install Needless Data On Whole System
OS/2: Obsolete Soon, Too
PnP: Plug and Pray
APPLE: Arrogance Produces Profit-Losing Entity
IBM: I Blame Microsoft
MICROSOFT: Most Intelligent Customers Realize Our Software Only Fools Teenagers
COBOL: Completely Obsolete Business Oriented Language
LISP: Lots of Insipid and Stupid Parentheses
MACINTOSH: Most Applications Crash; If Not, The Operating System Hangs
AAAAA: American Association Against Acronym Abuse.
WYSIWYMGIYRRLAAGW: What You See Is What You Might Get If You’re Really Really Lucky And All Goes Well.

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Funny Error Messages

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God as a Programmer

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Computer Stupidities

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Comedy Code is syntactically correct programming code written just for fun. The code doesn’t actually have to do anything if it’s executed, but it should look like regular code.

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Why computers are like men:

In order to get their attention, you have to turn them on.
They have a lot of data, but are still clueless.
They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they are the problem.
As soon as you commit to one, you realize that if you had waited a little longer, you could have had a better model.

Why computers are like women:

No one but the Creator understands their internal logic.
The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else.
Even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval.
As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.

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Laws of Computer Programming

Any given program, when running, is obsolete.
Any given program costs more and takes longer.
If a program is useful, it will have to be changed.
If a program is useless, it will have to be documented.
Any program will expand to fill available memory.
The value of a program is proportional to the weight of its output.
Program complexity grows until it exceeds the capabilities of the programmer who must maintain it.
Any non-trivial program contains at least one bug.
Undetectable errors are infinite in variety, in contrast to detectable errors, which by definition are limited.
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

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Lubarsky’s Law of Cybernetic Entomology: There’s always one more bug.
Shaw’s Principle: Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.
Woltman’s Law: Never program and drink beer at the same time.
Gallois’ Revelation: If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow enobled, and no one dares to criticize it.

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A programmer finds himself in front of a committee that decides whether he should go to Heaven or Hell. The committee tells the programmer he has a say in the matter and asks him if he wants to see either Heaven or Hell before stating his preference.

“Sure,” the programmer replies. “I have a pretty good idea what Heaven is like, so let’s see Hell.” So an angel takes the programmer to a sunny beach, full of beautiful women in skimpy bikinis playing volleyball, listening to music and having a great time. “Wow!” he exclaims, “Hell looks great! I’ll take Hell!”

Instantly the programmer finds himself in red-hot lava with demons tearing at his flesh. “Where’s the beach? The music? The women?” he screams frantically to the angel.

“That was the demo,” the angel replies as she vanishes.

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Jesus and Satan have an argument as to who is the better programmer. This goes on for a few hours until they come to an agreement to hold a contest with God as the judge. They set themselves before their computers and begin. They type furiously, lines of code streaming up the screen, for several hours straight.

Seconds before the end of the competition, a bolt of lightning strikes, taking out the electricity. Moments later, the power is restored, and God announces that the contest is over. He asks Satan to show his work. Visibly upset, Satan cries and says, “I have nothing. I lost it all when the power went out.”

“Very well,” says God, “let us see if Jesus has fared any better.”

Jesus presses a key, and the screen comes to life in vivid display, the voices of an angelic choir pour forth from the speakers.

Satan is astonished. He stutters, “B-b-but how?! I lost everything, yet Jesus’ program is intact! How did he do it?”

God chuckles, “Everybody knows… Jesus saves.”

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Redneck Computer Terms

LOG ON: Makin’ a woodstove hot.
LOG OFF: Don’t add no more wood.
MONITOR: Keepin’ an eye on the wood stove.
DOWNLOAD: Gittin’ the farwood off the truck.
MEGA HERTZ: When you’re not keerfull gittin’ the farwood.
FLOPPY DISC: Whutcha git from trying to tote too much farwood.
RAM: That thar thing whut splits the farwood.
HARD DRIVE: Gittin’ home in the winter time.
WINDOWS: Whut to shut when it’s cold outside.
SCREEN: Whut to shut when it’s black fly season.
BYTE: Whut them dang flys do.
CHIP: Munchies fer the TV.
MICRO CHIP: Whut’s in the bottom of the munchie bag.
MODEM: Whutcha do to the hay fields.
DOT MATRIX: Old Dan Matrix’s wife.
LAP TOP: Whar the kitty sleeps.
KEYBOARD: Whar you hang the dang truck keys.
SOFTWARE: Them dang plastic forks and knifes.
MOUSE: Whut eats the grain in the barn.
MOUSE PAD: That’s hippie talk fer the mouse hole.
MAINFRAME: Holds up the barn roof.
PORT: Fancy Flatlander wine.
ENTER: Northerner talk fer, “C’mon in, y’all.”
CLICK: Whut you hear when you cock your gun.
DOUBLE CLICK: When the dang gun don’t far when you pull the trigger.
REBOOT: Whut you have to do at bedtime when you forgot the kitty’s still outside.

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Software Development Cycles

Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free.
Product is tested. 20 bugs are found.
Programmer fixes 10 of the bugs and explains to the testing department that the other 10 aren’t really bugs.
Testing department finds that five of the fixes didn’t work and discovers 15 new bugs.
Repeat three times steps 3 and 4.
Due to marketing pressure and an extremely premature product announcement based on overly-optimistic programming schedule, the product is released.
Users find 137 new bugs.
Original programmer, having cashed his royalty check, is nowhere to be found.
Newly-assembled programming team fixes almost all of the 137 bugs, but introduce 456 new ones.
Original programmer sends underpaid testing department a postcard from Fiji. Entire testing department quits.
Company is bought in a hostile takeover by competitor using profits from their latest release, which had 783 bugs.
New CEO is brought in by board of directors. He hires a programmer to redo program from scratch.
Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free…

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Top 10 phrases spoken by a Klingon Programmer

A TRUE Klingon Warrior does not comment his code!
By filing this bug report you have challenged the honor of my family. Prepare to die!
You question the worthiness of my code? I should kill you where you stand!
Our competitors are without honor!
Specifications are for the weak and timid!
This machine is GAGH! I need dual Pentium processors if I am to do battle with this code!
Perhaps it IS a good day to die! I say we ship it!
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
My program has just dumped Stova Core!
Behold, the keyboard of Kalis! The greatest Klingon code warrior that ever lived!

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The programmer compiled an array of reasons as to why he can’t find a girlfriend with a good on her , reason 0 being that he has limited cache. So he searches his memory to recall connecting to the TCP/IP tunnel of his last girlfriend — sometimes even without a secure socket. His last girlfriend always complained about his lack of comments. He fumed, “I hate commenting!” Realizing it was a program requirement, he told her she had nice bits. This resulted in a Syntax Error. Now she demanded a massage, but this was rejected as “Feature Creep.” He smacked her back-end and shouted, “Who’s your parent node?!” He scanned for open ports. He attempted to install a backdoor worm but her response was 403. While his data uploaded into her input device, she considered terminating the process. But instead she initiated a Do While loop where she recalled a previous boyfriend with a larger pointer. To expedite the routine routine, she screamed, “Hack into my system! Hack deep into my system! You’re 1337, baby!” This caused his stack to overflow, and he shot his GUI on her interface. (Source)

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What’s the difference between drug dealers and computer programmers?

Drug Dealers	Computer Programmers
Refer to their clients as “users”.	Refer to their clients as “users”.
“The first one’s free!”	“Download a free trial version…”
Have important South-East Asian connections (to help move the stuff).	Have important South-East Asian connections (to help debug the code).
Strange jargon: “Stick,” “Rock,” “Dime bag,” “E”.	Strange jargon: “SCSI,” “RTFM,” “Java,” “ISDN”.
Realize that there’s tons of cash in the 14- to 25-year-old market.	Realize that there’s tons of cash in the 14- to 25-year-old market.
Job is assisted by the industry’s producing newer, more potent mixes.	Job is assisted by industry’s producing newer, faster machines.
Often seen in the company of pimps and hustlers.	Often seen in the company of marketing people and venture capitalists.
Their product causes unhealthy addictions.	DOOM. Quake. SimCity. Duke Nukem 3D. ‘Nuff said.
Do your job well, and you can sleep with sexy movie stars who depend on you.	Damn! Damn! DAMN!!!

Code Search Engines

timm — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:27:09 +0000

For many developers, the normal Google search engine is all they need to find source code on the Web to solve a particular programming problem. But Google doesn’t understand code, so dedicated code search engines have emerged to bring code search to a new level.

Following is a list of all known code search engines and the tagline and “About” information from the site. Please comment if you know of other code search engines, as I will keep this list updated.

byteMyCode

Helping you code, one byte at a time

byteMyCode is a project designed to make the task of sharing source code easier. We have modeled a community around making it easy to find, share, revise, comment on, and rate code snippets. byteMyCode serves as a good organizational tool for those little code snippets that you never know when you will need. It also comes in handy when you need to send a code snippet to a friend or coworker, but don’t have the means to do so.

Codase

Source Code Search Engine – Searching 250 million lines of code

Codase is the leading source code search company with advanced source code understanding and xml index/search technologies. Rather than treating code as text, Codase understands programming languages, and treats code as code, the way it’s supposed to be. This unique and syntax-aware approach provides the most accurate and detailed search results with fine granularity levels of controls. With Codase, one can search functions, classes, strings, constants, macros, comments and other programming language constructs.

Codase hosts huge amount of open source codes providing a much better coverage, as it covers codes usually hidden inside compressed files and source control repositories, where general search engines fail to find and index. In addition, Codase only indexes and searches high quality codes with every line of code literally validated and compiled by intelligent and powerful source code analysis engine.

CodeProject

5,084,793 members and growing!

The Code Project was formed to provide developers with a place to meet and exchange ideas. We hope to provide developers with all the resources they need to help them in their day to day programming, as well as helping them keep up to date with the latest technologies.

csourcesearch.net

Searching 283,407,427 lines of C/C++ code

freshmeat

freshmeat maintains the Web’s largest index of Unix and cross-platform software, themes and related “eye-candy”, and Palm OS software. Thousands of applications, which are preferably released under an open source license, are meticulously cataloged in the freshmeat database, and links to new applications are added daily. Each entry provides a description of the software, links to download it and to obtain more information, and a history of the project’s releases, so readers can keep up-to-date on the latest developments.

Google Code Search

Search public source code

Google Code Search helps you find function definitions and sample code by giving you one place to search publicly accessible source code hosted on the Internet. With Google Code Search, you can:

Use regular expressions to search more precisely
Restrict your search by language, license or filename
View the source file with links back to the entire package and the webpage where it came from

GotAPI

Fast API search including Java, PHP, HTML, CSS, AJAX, XML, and C/C++.

Koders

Searching 766,893,913 lines of open source code

Koders.com, a Black Duck Software Company, is a free on-line search engine for open source software and other web-downloadable code. Over 30,000 developers each day rely on Koders to search over 766 million lines of code written in over 30 languages and identified with 28 software licenses. Koders is helping to fuel the open source software revolution. Developers can use this free resource to quickly find the best reusable open source code, methods, examples, algorithms and more, enabling them to be more successful with open source and complete projects faster.

Krugle

Find code. Find answers.

Search 2.6 billion lines of code, 600 repositories and over 100,000 projects for free.

merobase

Component Finder

merobase is a search and tagging engine that allows users to find, remember and share components on the Internet. In contrast with first-generation code search engines, merobase treats source code modules as first class abstractions rather than chunks of text, and is thereby able to offer a much wider range of search options. In particular, merobase specializes in finding components based on their interface (or API) rather than the strings in their source code.

Microsoft Shared Source Initiative

Through the Shared Source Initiative, Microsoft is sharing source code with customers, partners, developers, academics, and governments worldwide. The Shared Source Initiative encompasses a wide spectrum of technologies, programs, and licenses offered by Microsoft to various communities of customers, partners, developers, organizations, and other interested individuals.

MSDN Code Gallery

MSDN Code Gallery is your destination for downloading sample applications and code snippets, as well as sharing your own resources.

O’Reilly Code Search

Enter search terms to find relevant sample code from nearly 700 O’Reilly books. The database currently contains over 123,000 individual examples, composed of 2.6 million lines of code — all edited and ready to use.

Planet Source Code

The largest public source code database on the Internet with 12,930,323 lines of code, articles and tutorials in 11 languages, as well as 1,677 open job postings.

QuickRef.org

Find Programming Documentation – Fast!

We have Perl, PHP, JavaScript, HTML DOM, CSS, and MySQL. And we added Ruby to be hip. We’re constantly working to add new resources and improve the ones we already have.

SourceForge.net

SourceForge.net is the world’s largest Open Source software development web site. SourceForge.net provides free hosting to Open Source software development projects with a centralized resource for managing projects, issues, communications, and code. Registered Projects: 175,968, Registered Users: 1,839,945.

Ucodeit

Ucodit is a search engine for open source code. Ucodit searches across popular open source repositories such as apache.org, java.net and Sourceforce.net to present the user with highly relevant interfaces, implementations and associations.

A+: Obscure Programming Language of the Month

timm — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:00:17 +0000

This is the first in what will be a series of articles, each highlighting an obscure programming language.

There are over 2700 languages spoken on Earth. And while there are only about a dozen popular programming languages, there are over 400 known programming languages, many of which you can see in this extensive “Hello World” collection.

A+

A+ is an interactive, interpreted, strongly-typed language created in 1988 by Arthur Whitney for numerically intensive applications such as finance. Other developers at Morgan Stanley extended the language, adding a graphical user interface with automatic synchronization between graphical widgets and data.

A+ is an array programming language and dialect of APL. Array programming is a high-level model that allows the programmer to operate on entire sets of data, without having to resort to explicit loops of individual operations. Unlike object oriented programming, which decomposes data to its constituent parts, array oriented programming groups data together.

A+ runs on Linux under the GNU General Public License, and development is done primarily in the Xemacs editor. A+ requires a special font called “kapl” to display the original APL symbols. Arthur Whitney went on to create the K programming language, a proprietary derivative of A+ that doesn’t require a special font and removes some of A+’s complexity.

Hello, World in A+

[]<-’Hello World!’

Reference

10 Commandments for Programmers

timm — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:16:54 +0000

I was reading an article about the death of actor Charlton Heston, most famous for his portrayal of Moses in Cecil B. DeMille’s epic movie, “The Ten Commandments.” That gave me the idea to write a “Programmer’s 10 Commandments,” but a quick perusal of Google showed that many people have already been there, done that.

So instead, here is a bunch of “Commandments for Programmers”:

10 Commandments of Egoless Programming – Coding Horror

15 Commandments to Curb Bad Programmer Habits – Software Reality

Programmer’s 10 Commandments – Dirk’s Junk Box

10 Commandments of a Programmer – Of Thoughts, Chocolate and Vices

1010 Commandments – Rayden Industries (1010 == 10 in binary)

10 Commandments of .NET – Vinod Kumar

10 Commandments of Software Engineering – CodeGuru

10 Commandments of Programming – Sydney Morning Herald

10 Commandments of Stress-Free Programming – Joke the Monkey

10 Software Startup Commandments – Mark Fletcher

10 Commandments for C Programmers – Henry Spencer

10 Commandments for the Security-Conscious Programmer – Builder.au

10 Commandments for Game Development – Ernest W. Adams

Open Source Commandments – ZDNet