The Cafes » Programming

java.util.Arrays uses quicksort (actually dual pivot quicksort in the most recent version) for primitive types such as int and mergesort for objects that implement Comparable or use a Comparator. Why the difference? Why not pick one and use it for all cases? Robert Sedgewick suggests that “the designer’s assessment of the idea that if a programmer’s using objects maybe space is not a critically important consideration and so the extra space used by mergesort maybe’s not a problem and if the programmer’s using primitive types maybe performance is the most important thing so we use the quicksort”, but I think there’s a much more obvious reason.
(more…)

In my day job I work with a lot of very smart developers who graduated from top university CS programs such as MIT, CMU, and Chicago. They cut their teeth on languages like Haskell, Scheme, and Lisp. They find functional programming to be a natural, intuitive, beautiful, and efficient style of programming. They’re only wrong about one of those.
(more…)

I hate 1% problems. No this isn’t an OWS slogan. I’m thinking of those code issues that really aren’t a problem 99% of the time, but when they bite, they’re really hard to debug and they cause real pain. Several common cases in Java:

1. Using java.util.Date or java.util.Calendar instead of JodaTime.
2. Not specifying a Locale when doing language sensitive operations such as toLowerCase() and toUpperCase().
3. Not escaping strings passed to SQL, XML, HTML or other external formats.

What I hate most is that it’s really, really hard to convince other developers that these are problems they should take seriously. (more…)

Last week one of my colleagues hit me with an idea that was so obvious when he pointed it out I wondered why I hadn’t realized it before:

If you’re designing for reuse, you’re doing it wrong.

In 2012 the only code you should be writing is what’s needed for the immediate task at hand. Don’t design for reuse. Don’t consider reuse. Don’t waste one minute of your day making code reusable.
(more…)

In 2011 my New Year’s resolution is to do more things the easy way, even if it takes longer the first time. I am going to stop using brute force to solve problems. In particular:

• I am finally going to memorize how one redirects both stderr and stdout to the same stream. (2>&1 |)
• I am going to learn the sed? trick my advisor showed me 20 years ago for repeating a command from the shell history while substituting one word for another, instead of just using the arrow key to backup to and erase the string. (^string1^string2^ or !!:s/string1/string2/ or for global substitution, not just the first occurrence !!:gs/string1/string2/)
• I am going to increase my regex fu and use regular expressions consistently instead of just editing 20 lines of copy and paste code. (This would be easier if every editor didn’t have subtly different syntax.)
• I am going to use Python to automate repetitive tasks.