Programmers Weekly Newsletter - Thursday, April 30, 2015

Top new questions this week: Should I validate a method call's return value even if I know that the method can't return bad input? I'm wondering if I should defend against a method call's return value by validating that they meet my expectations even if I know that the method I'm calling will meet such expectations. GIVEN User ... java validation null return-type defensive-programming   asked by didibus 19 votes answered by Ixrec 30 votes Commit at a logical checkpoint only, or also when you're at a stopping point? Life, the work day, and personal projects don't always give us the opportunity the commit code at a logical completion (functionality subset programmed, bug fix completely patched, etc.). Sometimes ... git   asked by Thomas Stringer 14 votes answered by coredump 9 votes Is it okay to have objects that cast themselves, even if it pollutes the API of their subclasses? I have a base class, Base. It has two subclasses, Sub1 and Sub2. Each subclass has some additional methods. For example, Sub1 has Sandwich makeASandwich(Ingredients... ingredients), and Sub2 has ... java inheritance type-casting   asked by codebreaker 14 votes answered by Thomas Junk 35 votes How to monitor a long-running program programmatically What I've currently got can be summed up with this pseudo code: public static void Main(string[] args) { var listOfObjects = Database.GetObjectsToUploadToOnlineService(); ... c# automation monitor   asked by Robert Snyder 10 votes answered by JDT 7 votes named arguments replaces the builder pattern When using a language that supports named and optional arguments, does the builder pattern no longer have a practical use? Builder: new Builder(requiredA, ... design-patterns   asked by Paul Nikonowicz 8 votes answered by Ixrec 10 votes API key - in content or header Working on an API at the moment and just wanted to gather opinions on where the best place to transmit the API key should be. I know that is shouldn't go in the URL, this leaves the request header or ... api   asked by garryp 7 votes answered by MainMa 5 votes Version controlling a database's contents I'm working on a web project that involves user-editable content, and I'd like to be able to do version-tracking of the actual content, which lives in a database. Basically, I want to implement ... version-control database-design   asked by Fake Name 7 votes answered by kiwiron 5 votes Greatest hits from previous weeks: What's wrong with comments that explain complex code? A lot of people claim that "comments should explain 'why', but not 'how'". Others say that "code should be self-documenting" and comments should be scarce. Robert C. Martin claims that (rephrased to ... programming-practices documentation comments complexity simplicity   asked by Aviv Cohn 180 votes answered by user61852 313 votes Stored Procedures a bad practice at one of worlds largest IT software consulting firms? I'm working at a project in one of the world's top 3 IT consulting firms, and was told by a DBA that company best practice's state stored procedures are not a "best practice". This is so contrary to ... sql-server stored-procedures   asked by user22453 87 votes answered by Eric J. 210 votes Can you answer these? Partial Model Updates From View I hope this is on-topic here since I'm a bit new to the whiteboard... I'm currently developing an application using ASP.NET MVC 5 (and WebAPI 2). One of my domain entities is huge, and is stored in ... mvc asp.net-mvc ajax   asked by JNYRanger 3 votes What is the maximum number of steps to find a bug using bisecting? Assume that a node A in the commit tree of a codebase contains a bug but some ancestor B of A is clean from that very bug. Given the topology of the commit tree [B,A] leading from B to A, can we ... graph scm   asked by Michael Grünewald 4 votes Picking m number in the best possible time Imagine we want to pick m numbers from n numbers so that the difference of the maximum and minimum of the n numbers be minimum, for example if m = 4 n =6 numbers: 10 12 10 7 5 22 The ... sorting dynamic-programming   asked by Amen 2 votes

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