Comment Re:850 meters??? (Score 1) 286
I'll 1-up you on that one:
While technically not a dam, the Dutch Afsluitdijk is 20 miles long,
and was finished in 1932.
Balancing Performance and Convention 171
markmcb writes "My development team was recently brainstorming over finding a practical solution to the problem that's haunted anyone who's ever used a framework: convention vs. customization. We specifically use Rails, and like most frameworks, it's great for 95% of our situations, but it's creating big bottlenecks for the other 5%. Our biggest worry isn't necessarily that we don't know how to customize, but rather that we won't have the resources to maintain customized code going forward; it's quite simple to update Rails as it matures versus the alternative. What have your experiences been with this problem? Have you found any best practices to avoid digging custom holes you can't climb out of?"
Python 2.6 to Smooth the Way for 3.0, Coming Next Month 184
darthcamaro writes "Some programming languages just move on to major version numbers, leaving older legacy versions (and users) behind, but that's not the plan for Python. Python 2.6 has the key goal of trying to ensure compatibility between Python 2.x and Python 3.0, which is due out in a month's time. From the article: 'Once you have your code running on 2.6, you can start getting ready for 3.0 in a number of ways,' Guido Van Rossum said. 'In particular, you can turn on "Py3k warnings," which will warn you about obsolete usage patterns for which alternatives already exist in 2.6. You can then change your code to use the modern alternative, and this will make you more ready for 3.0.'"
Comment Re:Can you think of any famous female programmers? (Score 1) 347
Speaking of the Turing Award, why isn't Alan Turing on the list of famous programmers?
I realise that it is up for debate whatever he was a programmer by modern standards, but there simply weren't any good computers to program on in his days. However, he (probably) wrote the first computer Chess-program in 1948, for a computer that didn't even excist at the time.
He deserves to be on the list, IMHO.
I realise that it is up for debate whatever he was a programmer by modern standards, but there simply weren't any good computers to program on in his days. However, he (probably) wrote the first computer Chess-program in 1948, for a computer that didn't even excist at the time.
He deserves to be on the list, IMHO.
