Highest scored questions

351 votes

6 answers

30k views

I was reading the Wikipedia article on Douglas McIlroy and found a quote that mentions "The real hero of programming is the one who writes negative code." What does that mean?

351 votes

20 answers

81k views

I am a developer in a 5-member team and I believe our project is headed for disaster. I'll describe why in a moment, but my question is: how should I behave? The deadline is in 1.5 months, and I ...

351 votes

7 answers

165k views

HTML4 / XHTML1 allows only GET and POST in forms, now it seems like HTML5 will do the same. There is a proposal to add these two but it doesn't seem to be gaining traction. What were the technical or ...

341 votes

14 answers

94k views

I had a heated discussion today about our MVC application. We have a website written in MVC (ASP.NET), and it usually follows the pattern of do something in the view -> hit the controller -> ...

338 votes

16 answers

181k views

Isn't the whole point of an interface that multiple classes adhere to a set of rules and implementations?

330 votes

19 answers

463k views

Possible Duplicate: Whats the difference between Entry Level/Jr/Sr developers? I'm curious what senior developer means because apparently the definition doesn't mean what I thought it would. I ...

330 votes

63 answers

56k views

I’ve been programming C# professionally for a bit over 4 years now. For the past 4 years I’ve worked for a few small/medium companies ranging from "web/ads agencies", small industry specific software ...

330 votes

4 answers

136k views

Often, in libraries especially, packages contains classes that are organized around a single concept. Examples: xml, sql, user, config, db. I think we all feel pretty naturally that these packages ...

329 votes

36 answers

395k views

Should curly braces be on their own line or not? What do you think about it? if (you.hasAnswer()) { you.postAnswer(); } else { you.doSomething(); } or should it be if (you.hasAnswer()) { ...

325 votes

25 answers

80k views

Just read the question about the Big Rewrites and I remembered a question that I've been wanting answered myself. I have a horrible project passed down to me, written in old Java, using Struts 1.0, ...

323 votes

52 answers

254k views

We have to admit that programming is much more difficult than creating documentation or even creating Gantt chart and asking progress to programmers. So for us that are naives, knowing that ...

313 votes

19 answers

169k views

C# allows the use of #region/#endregion keywords to make areas of code collapsible in the editor. Whenever I do this though I do it to hide large chunks of code that could probably be refactored into ...

310 votes

2 answers

546k views

I've seen this part of PEP-8 https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#package-and-module-names I'm not clear on whether this refers to the file name of a module/class/package. If I had one example ...

310 votes

4 answers

113k views

I got interested in the Soviet space program and was interested to discover that the software on the Buran spacecraft circa 1988 was written in Prolog. Does anyone know what languages might have ...

309 votes

6 answers

90k views

Why does every serious Github repo I do pull requests for want me to squash my commits into a single commit? I thought the git log was there so you could inspect all your history and see exactly what ...