Be Excellent To Each Other

Ha Ha

I don't think I've ever come across a programming language that I "fall in love with."

They all have their problems.

But yes, RaspberryPi - sign me up, sounds like a neat little device.

Maybe when C becomes DD.

Shouldn't that be '30 run'? I suppose it depends on the type of BASIC used... seems inconsistent, though. I'd either have numbered lines or not.

It'd be correct in BBC basic. Run isn't part of the program so wouldn't need a line number, it's a command to the computer to run the currently defined program, belongs with List et. al.

The bickering over languages in this thread proves my point. The Pi is standardised hardware and can circumvent this problem.

How? Being standardised hardware doesn't stop you being able to run compilers or interpreters for 50 different languages on it should you so wish.

More so, really. Python with or without 50 billion libraries and extensions for a start. BBC BASIC was pretty consistent!

Actually, every other year I start teaching students on C. It's a two year course with combined first and second years so I teach mostly VB for one year of units and and C for the other. I've found generally that the students end up preferring the language they started with.

It's possible that the ones that start with C end up with better understanding by the end, although this is more a hunch and I'm kind of biased. It must be beneficial to prefer the language that is more like everything ever instead of VB with it's stupid syntax stupidness.



The year we do C, we get as far as malloc(), have a laugh about it and move onto Java for the rest of the year.

Thinking of looking into getting iPhone dev stuff next year, which would mean Objective C instead. Maybe.

Objective C is hateful. But then maybe that's just me finding it hard to adjust.

Nah, it's OK. It helps if you've done some Smalltalk or other similar language first -- it derives more of it's philosphopy from there than it does from other modern C-derivatives like C++, Java, and C#.

Sensible. I don't think manual memory management has much place in a teaching language outside of a dedicated computer science degree (which isn't what we're talking about here, of course -- we're talking more general eduction). In fact, I wasn't even required to do any memory management in either of my computer science degrees -- I worked in Pascal (yes, I'm that old), Java, Python, Perl, and Prolog. I did do my undergraduate disseration in C++, but only because I chose to.

I did my Undergrad dissertation in Unreal.

Same here. I maintain that it is a better teaching language by far than c. We did Pascal at school, and Ada at University.



Pfft. Anything's better than semi-colons all over the place for no appreciable reason.

And me. Then Delphi.

In my course I did Modula 3, Modula 4, Pascal, assembler, C, C++, fortran and a few other weird shitty languages that I can't remember.

It was all crap

Yeah I also hate full stops and other puncuation it makes things messy and hard to read only thickies like such syntax

FTFY.

Try fun JavaScript, where if var a, b and c are all ten, a+b+c can return 1020

Okay, I'll bite, how does that work then?

Oh, and another one who cut their teeth on Pascal here. It was so long ago that I don't remember anything at all about it as a language but it taught me the concepts (variable, control flow statements, etc) well enough for me to move onto C so it did it's job.

I'm guessing at 10 + 10 + 10 = 10 + (10 + 10) = 10 + 20 = 1020?

var a = 10;
var b = "10";
var c = 10;

At least, I assume that's what Grim... means. JavaScript's type handling pisses me off every day.

Yeah, it's along those lines (although it would be "10", 10 and 10). The perils of having + as a string concatenator.

Or of implicit declarations.

I don't mind that so much (I do php, remember, which has types so loose you'd think they'd been a really busy whore for the past twenty years). But if I'm doing maths on a variable then it's a fucking number, bitch. If it isn't a fucking number (because it's "bob" or something) feel free to break. Otherwise - number.

Yeah, the problem is the dynamic typing, not the overloaded + operator. But then again, Grim..., have you ever used a statically typed language? I suspect you'd hate it.

Fo sho, and I don't mind them at all - I'd much rather they threw the brakes on than silently chugged on and ruined things. But it's still the + sign that's the culprit, as you can concatenate a pair of strings that you thought were integers, but you're unlikely to get the result you needed.

[edit]Thinking about it, the first thing I actually did any programming in was Flash, back with Actionscript, er, 2? That was statically typed. And the Android stuff is static. Even the php stuff I do is mostly statically typed (or, at least, "hinted") for classes and shit.

Java uses + both for string concatenation and addition, and it never does the wrong thing. Because strings and integers are fundamentally different types.

What does it do if you try `"10" + 10`?

Haha yay php

[edit]Fuck me, this is just as bad: http://codepad.org/EWXeXJ2E

I'm just excited to know what the fuck you guys are talking about, yay codeacademy!

I thought you did coding?

A few ruby scripts and winrunner scripts since I finished uni 15 years ago, but nothing to speak of since then really. I jumped straight into QA/Testing out of uni.

I held a door open for David Braben today.

Did he say "RIGHT ON COMMANDER!" after walking through?

He just smiled and nodded.

Well, next time you see him, tell him Warhead has been stuck in witch space fighting off an infinite number of Thargoids since about 1985 and is pretty pissed off about it.

brilliant

I once threatened him with great physical violence.

If more people did this he might get on and fucking finish Elite 4.

Or more realistically, start it again.

Ee
See:this surprises me, as I work in testing and my entire time is spent programming in c# orjavascript. Before I started I merely hated javascript, I now loathe it with the fury of a thousand suns.

It depends entirely on what you define as testing. Test automation is a very tiny part of what is possible, and in my experience developers are actually better suited to it (not that there aren't excellent test automation specialists out there). I spend most of my time telling people how to build and manage software so that it has less defects in it in the first place, rather than finding them after the fact. Whole lifecycle quality stuff.

I'm surprised at your surprise; have you never come across anyone who does a testing job without writing code? In my experience pure system testing (i.e. black-box functional testing) is the rule rather than the exception.

The only people I have found who do that are... not very effective. The quality of our software that uses full test automation is
whole factors of magnitude better than the ones done without.

You've never worked with any good manual testers? I'm astonished. No amount of automated testing in the world would equal half an hour with my lead QA gal.

Define full test automation

99% unit test coverage via TDD is pretty much the starting point, adding on story based functional tests gets you further down the road. That gives you the ability to test that your application does what it should do. Which frees up the QAs to do the real testing, of proving that it doesn't do what it shouldn't On most projects QAs are a scarce resource and devs are ten a penny, so we get them to do the grunt automation work

I do agree the quality of your average tester who doesn't know any coding is poor, but that is because there are a huge amount of testers out there who are just poor in general and their lack of automation skills just goes along with their lack of any other skills. Unfortunately it is easy to call yourself a "tester" if all you do is write manual test scripts and run manual test steps. Which is the same as calling yourself a journalist, because you know how to read and write IMO.

That's interesting, I suppose it might depend on the exact nature of what you're developing but all the companies I know anything of (my own, JP Morgan, Barclays, NAG) rely mostly on manual system testing with automated testing being used only to bolster certain aspects of that.

Personally I'm incredibly sceptical of automated testing because (a) it's a development effort in itself which adds risk and complexity to the delivery and (b) the only thing it's guaranteed to be useful for it regression testing, writing automated test for new/updated functionality which doesn't even exist yet is a challenge to say the least.

It depends how you do it. Doing automation at the point of creation, treating the automation code with the same control and rigour as you do production code, and using TDD combined with proper continuous integration, then it is incredibly powerful and useful. Automation after development is complete and without CI is pretty much a waste of time IME.

Also, this is such nonsense that I'm beginning to wonder if we're even using the same definition of 'tester' and 'testing' here?

Oh god. I wish we were so blessed.

I'd say any dev team these days working without any sort of automated testing is a foolish dev team. But of the pitfalls you mention I would add c) no extra pair of eyes to validate the developer's interpretation of the spec. Maybe it's because we're in a complex area, but we quite often get stuff bounced back from QA because we misunderstood the meaning of some XML field -- so we wrote code that was correct to how we believed it, but what we believed was wrong. No automated test is going to catch that.

Hmm, reading between the lines of your post there I think I would be 'QA' in your company. In my company each project is delivered by a team comprised of one to many Business Analysts knocking up spec documents; one to many developers knocking up code/doing unit testing and one to many system testers writing manual tests from the BSAs specs and then executing those tests against the developers code. We all sit and work together under a single delivery manager and there's no concept of separate teams for QA or development.

The developers don't use any tools for their unit testing to my knowledge, although I don't know if that's a decision that's been taken deliberately of if it's just never been considered. There are automated funtional system testing tools available (QuickTest Pro mostly) to the system testers but they're not widely used for various reasons.

It's worth taking from that that when I talk about testing and automated testing I'm specifically talking about functional system testing. Unit testing (i.e. anything developers do against their own code before handing it over to me) is largely outside my experience.

Yeah, sounds right -- although your test guys are more technical than ours. Our testers mostly work in soap-UI or other products my employer makes that sit further up our stack and hence form a UI to my product (which is a webservices middleware layer). However, our QA people are all experts in our business domain (travel -- many of them are former travel agents) and they are excellent at thinking of edge cases we overlook.