Programmers Weekly Newsletter - Thursday, July 30, 2015

Top new questions this week: Is throwing new RuntimeExceptions in unreachable code a bad style? I was assigned to maintain an application written some time ago by more skilled developers. I came across this piece of code: public Configuration retrieveUserMailConfiguration(Long id) throws ... java programming-practices   asked by Sok Pomaranczowy 27 votes answered by coredump 32 votes TODOs in Checked in Code I have been having a debate on this with people in my team over the past few weeks. Some in my team are against having TODOs checked into the source code of our project. Their reasoning is that a ... version-control coding-style comments issue-tracking   asked by Oliver Watkins 23 votes answered by Niall 21 votes Class with members that are mutable during creation but immutable afterwards I have an algorithm which creates a collection of objects. These objects are mutable during creation, since they start out with very little, but then they are populated with data in different places ... c#   asked by Paul Richards 20 votes answered by JacquesB 44 votes Algorithm for calculating a bullet path to a target with max. 2 ricochets Sorry for the poor title but I didn't have a better way to phrase it... So there's this amazing game by Nintendo (yes!) on Wii called WiiPlay. There're 9 minigames in it, and my favorite one is ... algorithms game-development problem-solving   asked by Greek Fellows 16 votes answered by Mandrill 6 votes Why does C# have both out and ref? C# have out and ref, why these two are required. I don't have depth knowledge of C#. Why out and ref parameters are required? c#   asked by Neo 11 votes answered by Mason Wheeler 20 votes What uses does Smalltalk's 'become:' have? The become: message in Smalltalk causes one object to change into another, affecting all references to it. What uses does this language feature have? Does it get used in real code? Is it just a ... object-oriented memory language-features smalltalk   asked by David P. Kendal 10 votes answered by World Engineer 8 votes Is it ok to avoid testing base classes? I have a base class with a fair amount of "meta programming" to give it the flexibility/abstraction it needs to be rather generic. I do have a lot of subclasses using the common methods in the base ... unit-testing testing   asked by Nathan 8 votes answered by Doc Brown 22 votes Greatest hits from previous weeks: Why are shortcuts like x += y considered good practice? I have no idea what these are actually called, but I see them all the time. The Python implementation is something like: x += 5 as a shorthand notation for x = x + 5. But why is this considered good ... programming-practices   asked by Fomite 247 votes answered by Emilio Garavaglia 514 votes Why do many exception messages not contain useful details? It seems there is a certain amount of agreement that exception messages should contain useful details. Why is it that many common exceptions from system components do not contain useful details? A ... c# c++ exceptions   asked by Martin Ba 171 votes answered by Mike Nakis 160 votes Can you answer these? How should I write the "Validation" parts of a FURPS+ document Alistair Cockburn says in Writing Effective Use Cases, that validation requirements should not go into the use cases. However, even after reading the chapter on Missing Requirements (meaning the ... requirements use-case furps+   asked by xenoterracide 2 votes Approach for polyglot logging I'm building a desktop app with a Java front-end and very performance critical Fortran libraries. We've recently started pushing more of our code out of Java and into Fortran (see below) Soon we will ... java libraries logging fortran polyglot   asked by Groostav 1 vote Does Akka obsolesce JMS/AMQP message brokers? I spent the last week deep diving into the Akka docs and finally understand what actor systems are, and the problems that they solve. My understanding (and experience with) traditional JMS/AMQP ... asynchronous-programming message-queue messaging akka   asked by smeeb 3 votes

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