Essays, opinions, and advice on the act of computer programming, from Stack Overflow.
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Dwarf Fortress is one of those oddball passion projects that’s broken into Internet consciousness. It’s a free game where you play either an adventurer or a fortress full of dwarves in a randomly generated fantasy world. The simulation runs deep, with new games creating multiple civilizations with histories…
This is a bit of a "holy war" among software developers; one that's been the subject of many debates and in-jokes. I use spaces, but I never thought it was particularly important. But today we're releasing the raw data behind the Stack Overflow 2017 Developer Survey , and some analysis suggests this choice matters…
You're not alone, jclancy. In the five years since this question was asked, there have been over a million other developers who got stuck in Vim and couldn't escape without a bit of help. Indeed, the difficulty of quitting the Vim editor is a common joke among developers.
Do you program in the evening? How about late at night? I enjoy programming as a hobby and I'm a bit of a night owl, so I often code well outside working hours, sometimes past midnight. And whatever time it is, when I run into a bug I visit Stack Overflow. This means that Stack Overflow data can give us insights into…
It's now been more than 50 years since the first IFIP Conference on Software Engineering, and in that time there have been many different software engineering methodologies, processes, and models proposed to help software developers achieve that predictable and cost-effective process. But 50 years later, we still seem…
We recently explored how wealthy countries (those defined as high-income by the World Bank) tend to visit a different set of technologies than the rest of the world. Among the largest differences we saw was in the programming language Python. When we focus on high-income countries, the growth of Python is even larger…
Dwarf Fortress is one of those oddball passion projects that’s broken into Internet consciousness. It’s a free game where you play either an adventurer or a fortress full of dwarves in a randomly generated fantasy world. The simulation runs deep, with new games creating multiple civilizations with histories…
One test case, not one test assertion.
Rust has been Stack Overflow's most loved language for four years in a row, indicating that many of those who have had the opportunity to use Rust have fallen in love with it. However, the roughly 97% of survey respondents who haven't used Rust may wonder, "What's the deal with Rust?"
In this article, we'll look at how to design REST APIs to be easy to understand for anyone consuming them, future-proof, and secure and fast since they serve data to clients that may be confidential.
Running a development team for each mobile platform sucks up resources from other work. Flutter is the most popular way for one development team to build on all platforms.
Why replacing programmers with AI won’t be so easy.
We recently showed that, based on Stack Overflow question visits, Python has a claim to being the fastest-growing major programming language, and that it has become the most visited tag on Stack Overflow within high-income countries .
We've been working hard for months , and today the Developer Survey results for 2019 are live. This year marks the ninth year we’ve published our annual Developer Survey, and nearly 90,000 developers took the 20-minute survey earlier this year.
You read documentation and tutorials to become a better programmer, but if you really want to be cutting-edge, academic research is where it's at.
JavaScript UI frameworks and libraries work in cycles. Every six months or so, a new one pops up, claiming that it has revolutionized UI development. Thousands of developers adopt it into their new projects, blog posts are written, Stack Overflow questions are asked and answered, and then a newer (and even more…
April Fool's may be over, but once we set up a system to react every time someone typed Command+C, we realized there was also an opportunity to learn about how people use our site. Here’s what we found.
In order to get the most performant site possible when building the codebase for our public Stack Overflow site, we didn’t always follow best practices.
OOP has been wildly successful. But was the success just a coincidence? And can it still offer something unique in 2020 that other programming paradigms cannot?
For some companies who have already made the change years ago, it won’t be an issue. However, there’s a whole range of companies who won’t be making the change anytime soon, for a number of reasons. What does this change mean for companies heavily utilizing the language, particularly those who may not be ready to…
How you can use micro-commits to effectively apply the Strangler Fig pattern.
In order to get the most performant site possible when building the codebase for our public Stack Overflow site, we didn’t always follow best practices.
While there are many resources to help programmers write better code—such as books and static analyzers—there are few for writing better comments. While it's easy to measure the quantity of comments in a program, it's hard to measure the quality, and the two are not necessarily correlated. A bad comment is worse than…
Check out a cool project that leverages Stack Overflow Data and Google's Cloud AI to predict what tags would work best on Stack Overflow questions.
To offer a seamless developer experience, we wanted to create a specialized programming language, called Motoko, that is designed to directly support the programming model of the Internet Computer, making it easier to efficiently build applications and take advantage of some of the more unusual features of this…
NoSQL was the next big thing in system architecture in 2011, but overall interest in it has plateaued recently. What is NoSQL, what does it have to do with modern development, and is it worth implementing in your project?
Code quality affects the mental state of a programmer, communication within their team, and the incentives attached to their work. Improve your code and you can improve your organizational health and competence as a whole.
Which dependencies should be present in your code base? This article suggests an answer to that question.
A question on Stack Overflow’s Software Engineering site caught our attention recently. It tries to come to terms with the impact of scrum on developers' ability to do a great job. The claim is a bold one: Scrum is turning good developers into average ones. Could that be true?