Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with programming

What is a good programming tool for developing RPG games?

jibberish — Sun, 19 May 2013 08:27:32 -0800

I want to develop an RPG game based on a non-popular, out of print tabletop RPG - the game I'm developing will be for PC/Mac/(possibly mobile). So far, I'm looking into RPG Maker, which seems to be able to fit the bill most appropriately. I've also looked at Titanium for developing mobile games, but this seems like it's not necessarily a good fit for just hitting the ground running. Any ideas are welcome - priorities are that the system is flexible for development and is easy to begin with (I'm cool with advanced features, but don't want to have to hack the system in order to merely start bringing my ideas to fruition).

PL/SQL resourse for folks mostly familiar with C-based OOP languages

kitcat — Thu, 16 May 2013 13:10:57 -0800

I feel like the best way for me to improve my very basic understanding of PL/SQL would be a book or website designed for an audience of programmers who know Java or C# or VB.NET. Is there such a thing? Yeah, PL/SQL is procedural, it should be simple (I imagine my hecklers saying), but when I see REFCURSORs and RECORDS and TABLES declared and manipulated, I just don't get it.

If you can't suggest something quite like what I am looking for, please do tell me what you think the best PL/SQL book is if you have an opinion on that. I appreciate it.

Outlook and VBA

Steely-eyed Missile Man — Mon, 13 May 2013 13:47:58 -0800

How to make Outlook automatically change the "From:" field when replying to certain emails? I receive email sent to two email addresses; we will call them personal@ and support@. The personal@ email is my primary address, the support@ just gets forwarded to me, so all emails sent to both addresses go into one Inbox (though I sort the support@ emails into their own folder automatically).

Here is the issue. The support@ emails are from users trying to get help, and when I reply to them I don't want it come from My Name (personal@), I would like it to show up as coming from Product Support (support@). Looking around, it seems the only way to do this is with VBA, but I have been unable to find the proper resources to do it on my own (I have no VBA or really programming experience; I did find a snippet of code but was unable to find how to actually make it do anything).

I am using Outlook 2007. I would also like to have a separate signature go with these emails, but that seems fairly easily remedied, either manually or via a signature picker (though handling that automatically would be a great bonus); the changing email address/sender does not seem so easily dealt with. How would one accomplish this?

Looking for examples of beautiful programming cheat sheets

primer_dimer — Fri, 10 May 2013 02:42:28 -0800

I have an urge to make a series of cheat sheets for a project that currently lacks them (the Grails web framework, if anyone's interested) and am looking for design inspiration. It's easy to find cheat sheets online, but most of them are (perfectly functional!) variations on zebra-striped tables. Googling for "well-designed cheat sheets" and similar gives results that contain cheat sheets for designers - I am looking for examples of well-designed cheat sheets that use color, typefaces etc. in a way that's information-dense but also pleasing to the eye. If anybody has links to examples of cheat sheets (for programming languages or otherwise), please leave a comment.

I can FizzBuzz! Where do I go from here?

Phire — Mon, 06 May 2013 08:26:41 -0800

I am teaching myself how to program. But there seems to be a big gap between intro courses/resources (CodeCademy, O'Reilly books, Learn X the Hard Way) and Actually Doing Things. Help me figure out a road plan? I know HTML and CSS pretty well. I know a teeny bit of PHP and JS and MySQL, and even less of AJAX/JSON, but enough to mess around with existing CMSes and hack together simple custom solutions from StackOverflow and Google. I'm starting to learn Python (I've gone through Zed Shaw's Learn Python the Hard Way). I've also done the Javascript track on CodeCademy, and I'm starting on the "build a search engine" CS 101 course on Udacity.

I'm finding that a lot of the recommended intro resources for these things kind of start off at the same place - basic logic, loops, conditionals, etc. - and then say "Okay, go do stuff". But the stuff I want to do tends to be several orders of magnitude beyond what the intro books have taught. Shaw's book is a good example of this: I can build a CYOA game in terminal! Great. How does this translate to...actually writing a program with a GUI and how do I integrate this with some form of data storage and oh god there's this thing called garbage collection that everyone talks about and ahh.

A lot of advice you see out there is "just start programming!" but I honestly don't even know where to begin. I see cool projects on Github and I can't begin to understand the source code. I also know enough to know that it's really easy to screw things up, and I feel like I don't know nearly enough (or anything at all) about best practices for writing secure code, minimizing run time.

What I'm looking for:
I do really well with structured/project-based learning, which is why the Udacity course seems promising. Just straight-up reading the documentation of the various languages tends to make my brain spin. Can you recommend a guide / a road plan for how to incrementally step up from FizzBuzz to something resembling Actual Skill? Maybe something like Project Euler that isn't quite as math based.

[Extraneous info, possibly useful]
What I'm already doing:

Trying to work on personal projects that are just a little bit beyond what I feel comfortable with. This is fun, but I also can't help but think I'll have a lot of gaps in my knowledge if I only work on things that I can envision, and I can only envision things that are based on the skills I already know.

Reading StackOverflow to see other people's code, posting stuff on CodeReview when relevant.

Slowly (slowly) working my way through the Python Challenges.

What I would like to do with this skill:

Professionally: be a kick-ass web developer. I work as a front-end dev now, but most of what I do is CMS customization (WP, Drupal) and while that is its own niche, it also seems very limited in terms of professional advancement.

Personally: be one of those people encounters a problem / has an idea and can write a script to fix it. This might include stuff like "I need to find a way to integrate RSS content from disparate sources into a uniform-looking output" or "I want to interact with the Twitter API and do cool textual analysis with it" or anything else.

Blue-sky thinking: get to a place where I could build a web-app/service that is actually helpful (or entertaining) for other people. Not because start-up VC blah, but because helping people is awesome. For example, a thing that I'm building for myself right now is a habit-tracker with lots of built-in data-wankery with respects to streaks, averages, trends, etc. It's just PHP and MySQL right now (I haven't gotten to the "graph this data" stage yet) but I could see this being something that people might want.

The Travelling Programmer

Anonymous — Sun, 05 May 2013 15:57:18 -0800

I'd like to travel the world for a few years and work on some iOS app ideas at the same time, with the hope that if one of 'em makes enough money I can keep doing it forever! However, I reckon hostels probably aren't the most productive places in the world. Have any of you ever done something like this? What's the best approach for getting in the zone and being productive when you're on the go and surrounded by people? Are coffeehouse programmers as common in Europe as they are in the Silicon Valley? What about work-life balance -- is it possible to maintain a healthy hostel social life while also getting stuff done? Any advice would be much appreciated. Thank you!

Lost in the loops

Cat Pie Hurts — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 14:34:59 -0800

Programming question: I'm looking for recommendations for some kind of visualization tool to help me stay organized within complex nested loops and if statements. This may be a noob question, even though I'm not really a noob. My biggest problem writing code is that I get lost when writing nested loops and if statements, and in turn, my logic gets all confused. So it takes a really long time for me to put together something relatively simple. Tabbing, code folding, prolific commenting..nothing seems to help me. It's like I'm trying to produce something multidimensional in all linear terms, and I just wind up getting confused. Do I just need to think about it in different terms? Help!

What are the prerequisites to learn HTML5?

omaralarifi — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 02:25:21 -0800

I am a beginner in information technology, and I need to learn HTML5. For me to start learning HTML5, I need to know what languages/codes that I should know to start working in HTML5. I know HTML5 are used for webpages, mobile, games, and others. For example, I knew that I should be familiar with CSS3 So what are other basic information and skills needed to learn before starting with HTML5? Thanks

Should I list my freelance programming work on my resume?

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 17:35:13 -0800

I'm applying for jobs as a programmer and I'm wondering whether to list the freelance programming work I've done. I have a day job as a programmer that I've held for the last few years. It was the first real job that I got after graduating college, but now I'm looking to move on. Since all of my professional experiences before taking this job have been temporary internships and the like, I'd really like to add the recent freelance work that I've done, because I think it shows some initiative, because my professional experience section currently consists of only my one "real" job and then just two short-term gigs, and because the people I worked with would be good references.

I hesitate to add it only because I'm under the impression that most companies have a policy against taking on side jobs. My employer doesn't have a policy against it, but I'm worried that if I list both my current job and this freelance work that prospective employers might assume that I did that freelance work in defiance of my employer's policy. What should I do?

What are all these programming languages good for?

Guernsey Halleck — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 16:57:22 -0800

Ruby, Python, PHP, JavaScript, etc! Help me bring my very outdated coding skills back from the grave! Can anyone either explain or point me to a good resource that explains concisely why I'd want to use one programming language vs another? So, I used to be reasonably good at programming on the hobbyist level. However, this was back in the days of Turbo C++ and DOS 5. Not exactly cutting-edge anymore. For various personal reasons, I've decided to refresh my coding skills and join the 21st Century, but I find I'm at a loss for where to begin. I keep reading about a number of programming languages that I could be using, but it's not at all clear to me why I would choose one over another. I'm completely overwhelmed. Can anyone help enlighten me please?

While I don't have any specific big-picture projects in mind, I probably would want to be able to do at least a little light data analysis. Assume that I'm totally fine with basic coding structure, and comfortable with object-oriented structures.

Thanks for helping an old dog try to learn some new tricks.

Managing Multiple Versions?

AzraelBrown — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 14:29:52 -0800

I'm looking for best-practices for managing multiple versions of the same C# code which are *almost* the same, but not quite. I'm not familiar with version control software at all, but what I've read is that revision control software does the opposite of what I'm trying to do. I'm not trying to consolidate changes into a single current master version; I'm trying to manage multiple, similar "forks" of the same program, so that if a major change to the underlying code that applies to all versions it can be handled cleanly, but still keep each version distinct.

A few more details: We sell a software package that allows custom data entry forms with all sorts of fun C# under the hood; my job is to develop these custom data-entry DLLs for the customers that buy the software package through us. All the customers are in the same industry, so I can reuse a lot of my code, but each one has some specific needs that have to be addressed.

So, I made code for one customer's specifications and everything worked great. The second customer needed a couple tweaks off of what the first one had, so now I have two good versions. Now Customer #3 splits the difference, putting back in things #1 needed that #2 didn't, but uses one of #2's features and then tosses in its own custom needs. I've consolidated as much as I can to reduce the amount of places things need to be changed, but, say, a field is added or changed from a text box to a dropdown box, there might be ten places that need a data type changed. But, now let's say I find a bug that affects the 90% of identical code -- but I've got three different sets of source code now to update each one the same way, and I can see down the road when I've got 10 customers things are going to get hairy. I'm also making things less complicated by doing 'dirty' things like just hiding, rather than removing, orphan fields, or re-using fields without changing names, which are only going to make things worse in the long run.

So, how do programmers manage having multiple parallel versions of the "same" software, to ensure that everyone stays up to date? Is this something that Git or Subversion actually does but I don't understand it well enough?

Talk to me programmers!

nel — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 10:19:56 -0800

Is it worth changing careers, getting a masters in CS? I received a BS in mechanical engineering from a decent state school. I currently work as a mechanical engineer at a small capital equipment company, making about $60k a year. I've been at said company full-time for about 2 years. It was my first job out of college. I've always been into computers, and I've done a decent amount of programming at my current job (mainly PLC and HMI programming), which I find to be fun and interesting. I've been fantasizing about going into software development, but I have some questions about it.

Is it worth getting a masters in computer science? If so, is it worth paying for a degree at a higher ranking school if I can even get into one? I have a pretty good record: 3.9 GPA, undergraduate research experience, 3 years work experience including 2 internships I did in college. I took the GRE without really studying and scored 500 verbal, 730 math, which I think is fairly average for engineering students. I think degrees in ME/CS would be an interesting combination, but I also still have $20k in loan debt to pay off from undergrad.

OR should I just hack it and start programming for fun in my free time and try to develop a portfolio? All the programming I do now I learned on the job. I've read that a lot of programmers don't have degrees in the subject. Would I get paid a lot less (vs. my current job and vs. degree'd people) starting out without a degree?

If you're in the industry, do you like it? Do you find it to be flexible in general (work hours, can easily switch jobs, work from home, etc.)? Do you think it's more profitable in the current climate to start a business that offers software products/solutions instead of hardware?

GPS: Common knowledge?

Vampire Cat — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 08:23:53 -0800

Are there any published studies / figures about what percentage of smartphone users know what GPS is (i.e., do smartphone users know GPS determines your precise location)? Bonus question: do they know it's a battery drainer? I'm looking specifically for actual data, not anecdata. I need to back up my position to skeptical coworkers. I work at a small software shop making a GPS-using app, and we're having some debate about what people know.

What is the best programming language for the job?

Dynex — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 09:45:33 -0800

For a personal project I'm working on, what would be the best programming language if I wanted the user to be able to input some text and image choices and have them receive the information back in an eBook? I've used PHP before to store and retrieve that information, but I'm not sure it could handle the conversion to an ebook. My programming skills are rather limited, so I would probably end up hiring someone to code it for me. Advice on how to go about hiring someone specializing in that language and which questions to ask to make sure they know what they doing is also appreciated.

Should I attend App Academy?

Anonymous — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 17:15:08 -0800

Should I attend App Academy? I have been accepted to App Academy . I have a decent, well-paying, fairly boring job that I would be leaving to attend. I've been picking up programming on my own for a few months and I really enjoy it, but quitting my job to attend a programming boot camp will be a pretty drastic step.

Moreover, I don't much about the software development job market. It sounds like this program will provide excellent training in ROR and web app development, and their placement stats look good. But is this a legitimate way to enter the software development industry? Can one sustain a career in software development without a degree in computer science or coursework in things like discrete math and algorithms? Would the software developers of mefi recommend this to a friend looking to make a career change?

Bonus question: what would be the career path for someone in app development? Do you just become a senior developer, or are there other paths? Is there room for salary growth?

Thanks!

Is there a strategy game with a ret-conned API to it?

RustyBrooks — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 08:02:40 -0800

For basically my whole teen-to-adult life I have wanted to write AI for video games as a hobby. Mostly games of the overhead strategy type, think Red Alert, Warcraft (not World Of), Starcraft and so forth. I know that people have written things for these, usually using pretty complicated methods - screen scraping, video-card-memory-trawling, network data capture, etc.

What I'm curious about, though, is if there is a game of this type, of pretty much any vintage that will run on a modern machine, that someone has built an API for, for this purpose. Something that you can query to get info about the units and buildings, or that you can get streamed updates from, and you can send commands back as if a person were clicking a mouse around.

I think it would be really awesome, and you could have robot leagues that play against each other and so forth. Just curious if anyone has done the work to make this possible.

And although I'm sure I would have heard of it if it were possible... are there any games written for this purpose?

Advice for a female getting into programming as 2nd career?

lattiboy — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 13:54:58 -0800

I'd like to help my friend look into a career in programming. Best way to do it? Background:

She graduated with a minor in mathematics from a SUNY school and substitute teaches math at an incredibly prestigious private high school. She took some light programming in college and enjoyed it well enough, but got into another non-technical field for a decade.

She left her job about a year ago and has had no luck finding something similar.

Questions:

1) Is there a program I should point her towards that works to get women involved in programming? Better yet one that deals with 2nd career individuals?

2) She's not keen on taking out student loans and going back to school, especially in the current economic climate. I know there are a lot of free online training sites, but what specific resources would people here recommend to get her feet wet?

3) What is generally considered the least daunting language to work with? She's brilliantly smart, but hasn't touched a command line in 11 years. I've been told PERL or Ruby are good ones, but opinions are all over.

Thanks so much.

Help me create a 10 hour coding project to assess contractors for hire

Th!nk — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 14:38:07 -0800

I'm trying to hire a full time coder for my business. I build, maintain, and remodel my own portfolio of websites (PHP, JS, WP, HTML, CSS, MySQL, etc). Once I have a few candidates I would like to assign them all the same small (paid) project so that I may assess their abilities. What should the test include? All candidates will be US-Based. $6000/mo budget cap. The most important skills are PHP, JS, MySQL, Wordpress, and the ability to self-organize and self-manage. Experience/familiarity with MVC architectures is also important as I have a few projects which will require completely custom CMS's.

I used to do all of my coding myself, but at best I would be considered an arm-chair coder. I've spent well over $50k on foreign odesk contractors and have been marginally satisfied with their quality - so now that I can afford to pay more it's time to find somebody proficient for long-term remote work on the sites in my portfolio.

I would really appreciate some ideas about what the best test project might be in order to judge them comparatively. Everyone will be native-English speakers based in the US.

I'm stumped on the details now that I'm trying to hire people who know more than me. What things should be included in this test to demonstrate capability and what should I look for specifically in their processes and code when the time is up?

What programming language should I learn in order to freelance?

MisantropicPainforest — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 12:51:50 -0800

This Fall I will be starting a PhD in the social sciences. Because of my research interests/subfield, I will have to know the ins and outs of statistical software like R, Stata, and SAS. Can this knowledge enable me to freelance for some supplemental income or should I being learning another programming language? I already have a MA and know a required real-life language, so I won't have too much coursework or requirements other than my comprehensive examinations. I also won't have to travel too frequently for my research. Freelance part-time programming will pay better than adjuncting during the dissertation research phase, and makes me more employable if and when I have trouble finding a postdoc or a tenure track job.

So, can I make some freelancing with my SAS, R, or Stata knowledge or should I try and pick up another language like Python or Java?

Also, I may defer my admission for a year, so I may have plenty of time before school starts to get my skills in gear.

I have no programming experience other than dabbling in high school and college.

Using grep to extract x characters of text after a predictable pattern

infinitejones — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 03:39:17 -0800

I'm trying to work out how to use something like grep or sed or awk (or maybe even some Perl) to extract a string of characters which appears in a predictable place in a series of text files. Help/advice/tutorials very welcome! I have a number of text files in a Google Drive folder, which gets replicated on my Mac, and a new one gets added every day. The files are plain text and they aren't structured formally (as in, they're not XML or anything) but they each contain a certain string ("Total Portfolio Value") which is always followed by a space, followed by "$xx,xxx.xx", followed by five more spaces. The value of $xx,xxx.xx changes every day, and that's what I'm trying to extract, to put into a separate file.

I can use Automator to check whenever a new file appears and run a shell script on the file, so I'm trying to work out what goes in the shell script.

As much as anything else I'm using this as a practical exercise to teach myself a bit about text processing using grep/sed/awk, Perl and regular expressions (any/all of the above!) so just a few pointers about the best approach the contents of the shell script would be great!

Attribute trouble when instantiating a class in Python 2.7

COBRA! — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 15:10:06 -0800

I'm having maddening problems creating objects in Python. Details inside This is the beginning of a class definition I'm using:

class popObj(object):
"""standalone class mainly holding list of binary trees and generation"""
def _init_(self):
#initializes two empty lists and a generation tracker
self.biTrees=[None]*POP
self.selectedTrees=[None]*POP
self.generation = 0

In the main module of the program, then, I call:

population=popObj()

I'm able to put objects into the list at population.biTrees[] with no problem. But when I try to do anything with population.selectedTrees or population.generation, I get this error:

AttributeError: 'popObj' object has no attribute 'selectedTrees'

What's going on? This is driving me nuts. I recognize that my class definition isn't very elegant, but I can figure out why some of the attributes don't exist.

How do I go about hiring someone to build a mobile app?

KimikoPi — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 21:39:23 -0800

Where and how can I hire someone in the U.S. (or India or any other country with these skills) to write a mobile app for me? I'm aware of websites like elance and odesk where programmers bid for work. What's the cost range for this type of quality work? I have an idea for an Android/iTunes type mobile app to be used by certain professionals (one myself I would use but is currently not on the market). But I have zero programming experience.
Also, assuming I can hire someone to write the app, how do I get copyright protection for it? Or is there absolutely no protection for mobile apps...everyone can just make their own version after the first guy comes out with one?

What is the current status of Django?

a womble is an active kind of sloth — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 20:38:19 -0800

Is Django still widely used by software developers? I'm using Django for some work, and find it very useful in general. However, something I can't quite figure out is how popular it is. I know that there are a few high profile websites that use it, but it's not clear to me whether it is still a vibrant community or not.

Most of the developers I know, use PHP or Ruby, but I find Django (specifically GeoDjango) to be extremely useful for my work. When I go to read StackOverflow questions, or seek code examples online the total number seems much lower than I would expect. For example, I want to learn how to handle user authentication with 3rd party services. I've found a few libraries for doing this, but not a large number of examples using these libraries. I was not sure if I'm searching for the wrong terms of whether the community has always been quite small.

Hence my question - is the framework still living and healthy, or is it slowly dying off?

Help a programmer take care of her eyes, please.

kitcat — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 17:44:12 -0800

I just started my first developer job. I squint at the computer screen all day. By the end of the day, my eyes are red and bloodshot. I can't deal with small text, but I can't make it all bigger - for instance, I can change the size of the code in my IDE, but not the debugger. I've reduced the brightness of my monitors dramatically. The only time my eyes don't hurt is when I'm so absorbed in my work that I don't notice. By the end of the day, I don't want to focus my eyesight on anything; it's even killing me to type this. Even watching tv bothers me. I seriously don't know how to take care of my eyes. Can you please offer some advice, and even give me a few horror stories about what happens to people who don't learn to take care of their eyes? I've been to two optometrists in the last year; one gave me a prescription for 1.25 glasses (they seem to help only a tiny bit) and the other said I have 20/20 vision. I recently started Cipralex, if that is relevant. I've noticed my eyes are more dilated than usual (I've been on SSRIs before, and did not have this side effect).

developing a new document format: how to start?

Philosopher Dirtbike — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 07:50:10 -0800

i have a need for a new document format. This document format would be novel, bringing together various kinds of media (text, code, vector and raster image formats, and maybe others) together in one container. These pieces would all have specific relation to one another, as defined by the creator of the document. I know that no document format exists to do what I want to do, and I'd like to develop it - by myself, at first, until I get a handle on the basics of the problem. I'm a programmer (mostly scientific programming, but also HTML, CSS and Javascript) so I have the tools to do it, but I've never considered a problem of this sort before. How do I start tackling this problem? What examples are out there for me to examine? What tools are available for me?