The Big Programming Thread - Page 452

On March 08 2014 11:02 darkness wrote:


The quick 'solution' is to look for a free shell access: http://shells.red-pill.eu/
However, you won't really experience *nix in depth. As others have said, you should try to install a distro. One popular suggestions usually is Ubuntu, but I was never fan of it. I'm more of a Debian/Gentoo guy, but the latter isn't recommended if you are not aware of Linux.

On March 08 2014 11:05 Cyx. wrote:

Our university computer labs have Scientific Linux installed on them so I'll probably just spend the weekend there messing around ^^ I know my way around it a little already from that too so it should be ok.

On March 08 2014 11:05 Cyx. wrote:

Our university computer labs have Scientific Linux installed on them so I'll probably just spend the weekend there messing around ^^ I know my way around it a little already from that too so it should be ok.

On March 08 2014 10:43 Cyx. wrote:

Hey.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_(video_game) that was my favourite game growing up, even when I played WoW =( You can make cool things in Flash if you want to.

On March 08 2014 10:45 misirlou wrote:


You can always use a VM like Vmware and install one or more distros of linux (using a yum/apt distro and different DEs if you want to go really deep but 1 should get u the basic, either debian or fedora imo). I've picked up linux as I was needing things so I can't really say whats the most important or first thing to learn. Basic bash commands perhaps? Understanding how the files are organized is somewhat important, permissions (read write execute for owner, group and others). Learning to configure builds and compile stuff is really important too, since not everything is available in binaries.

On March 09 2014 01:58 LaNague wrote:
can anyone recommend good books or stuff about writing more clean project code?

My stuff works and my interfaces are always clean, but internally i can get kind of messy.
Especially since i often think about things while programming and then i change stuff around a bit and then only comments on every line can make things clear for others.

On March 09 2014 01:58 LaNague wrote:
can anyone recommend good books or stuff about writing more clean project code?

My stuff works and my interfaces are always clean, but internally i can get kind of messy.
Especially since i often think about things while programming and then i change stuff around a bit and then only comments on every line can make things clear for others.

On March 09 2014 08:44 Blisse wrote:


The only real rule I've seen from writing cleaner code is to make friends and/or work with people who write cleaner code than you do. Most of my knowledge has been from seeing code from programmers better than me, and then realizing, oh shit I could just program this way and it would be so much nicer. Part of doing this is actually just coding a lot a lot more. For example, if you're only ever coding for school assignments, your opportunity to improve is so much more limited than someone who codes on the side, or participates in hackathons. Someone who has matured from seeing and writing a lot more code can more easily make distinctions about what would be a clean implementation overall.

Personally, I really adopt the Agile software development cycle, which in essence just says, you're going to refactor a lot, why not just accept that you're going to refactor. The rule for me is, get something down, then iterate and iterate and iterate until I'm satisfied. I'm not the strongest programmer because that's just how that turned out, so the idea of iterating allows me to continually improve my code, which over time increases my ability to see what direction I should take with bad code, and what direction I should start my project code towards.

The idea is that very experienced programmers simply need fewer iteration cycles to get the result they want.


As a rule, I only write comments for obscure code such as hacks or workarounds, which rarely happen. From what I've seen people who write lots of comments are not strong programmers. Good code is self-documenting because good code clearly states its intent, and as a virtue of that becomes very easily readable.

On March 09 2014 00:57 nunez wrote:
make sure boost-folder is in your include search path, maybe osx put the boost directory in some awkward spot.

do something equivalent to:
locate boost/filesystem.hpp
add -I/include/path to the CXXFLAGS (or whatever) in your makefile or add /include/path/ in your $PATH env variable.
probably you'll have to add the library location to the linkers path too, but cross that bridge when you come to it.

boost filesystem is a nice library. i think it's gonna be absorbed into std in c++14.
arch linux <3

On March 09 2014 16:38 obesechicken13 wrote:
ruby on rails is so complicated... how do I even run a stupid script? Controllers and views and shit...

There's such a huge learning curve and this tutorial just throws you into the water http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html and tells you to flap your arms.

I'm trying to convert a json to an xml using ruby.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4272410/how-can-i-convert-json-to-xml-in-ruby

require 'active_support' #for to_xml() 'gem install activesupport' use the 2.3 branch
require 'json' #part of ruby 1.9 but otherwise 'gem install json'

my_json = "{\"test\":\"b\"}"
my_xml = JSON.parse(my_json).to_xml(:root => :my_root)

Where do I define my json variable that's being received?
What does :root => :my_root mean?
What does \"test\":\"b\" mean?
Can I run this code standalone without a rails server?
I keep getting an error undefined method "to_xml" how do I resolve? Is there something I need to install?

Is ":root" a symbol? Where do you define the :my_root symbol? What would an example be?

There's just so many questions and no one to hold my hand and walk me through it D:<