Not sure if this is the right place to bring up this kind of discussion but, Im reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflective_programming and feel I need a bit further clarification for where the line between "reflective" & non-reflective programming really goes. Theres a series of examples of reflective v non-reflective code towards the end of the wikipedia page where all the "reflective" examples seem to access data with string identifiers - but what would actually differentiate this from say putting a bunch of objects in a collection/array of some sort and accessing them by an index - say compared to accessing them by an array of string identifiers that you can use to fetch the desired object?
In some languages you can clearly see the difference & benefit, like in Python & JS they have the eval method that lets them insert all sorts of code at runtime that can be pretty much endlessly complex and completely change the code flow of an application - and no longer limited to accessing mere special type objects. But in the examples listed on the wiki page you can also find examples where the "reflection" seems limited only to accessing specially declared objects by there name (at which point Im questioning if you can really argue that the program really can be considered to be "modifying" itself at all, at least on a high level in conceptual point of view).
Does the way that the underlying machinery producd by the compiler (or the way that the interpreter reads your code) affect whats considered to be reflective?
Is the ability of redefining the contents of existing objects or declaring new objects without a "base class"/preexisting structure created at compile time that differentiates reflective & non-reflective code? If so, how would this play with the examples at the wikipedia page that doesnt seem to showcase this ability?
Can the meaning of "reflective programming" vary slightly depending on the scenario?
Any thoughts appreciated <3
What are the syntactical features of current languages that prove problematic for screen readers or braille readers? What symbols and constructs are annoying to hear or feel? To the blind programmers out there, if you were to design a programming language which was easier for other blind people to work with, what would it be like?
Although it is a very interesting question, it is highly a matter of personal preferences and likings, so I'll answer as if you asked me personally.
Note: My working system is Windows, so I'll focus on it. I can write cross-platform apps, of course, but I do that on a Windows machine.
Indentation, White Spaces
All indentation-related things are more or less annoying, especially if the indentation is made with multiple spaces, not tabs (yes yes, I know the whole "holy war" around it!). Python did teach me to indent code properly even in languages that don't require it, but it still hurts me to write proper Python because of these spaces. Why so? The answer is simple: my screen reader tells me the number of spaces, and the actual nesting level is four times less. Each such operation (20 spaces, aha, dividing by 4, it is fifth nesting level) brings some overhead to my mind and makes me spend my inner "CPU" resources that I could free for debugging or other fancy stuff. It is a wee little thing, you'd say, and you'd be right, but this overhead is on each and single line of my (or another person's!) code I must read or debug! This is quite a lot.
Tabs are much better: 5 tabs, fifth nesting level, nice and well. Braille display here would be also a problem because, as you probably know, a Braille display (despite the name) is a single line of text, usually 14 to 40 characters long. I.e., imagine a tiny monitor with one single line of text that you pan (i.e., scroll), and nothing besides that. If 20 chars are spaces, you stay with only 20 chars left for the code. A bit more, if you read in Grade 2 Braille, but I don't know whether it would be appropriate for coding, I mostly use speech for it, except some cases.
Yet more painful are some code styling standards where you have to align code in the line. For instance, this was the case with tests in moment.js. There the expected values and messages should match their line position so, for example, the opening quote would be in column 55 on every line (this is beautiful to see, I admit). I couldn't get my pull request accepted for more than a week until I finally understood what Iskren (thank him for his patience with me!), one of the main developers, was trying to tell me. As you can guess, this would be completely obvious for a sighted person.
Block Endings
A problem adjacent to the previous one: for me personally it is very nifty when I know that a particular code block ends. A right brace (as in C) or the word end (as in Ruby) are good, indentation level change (as in Python) is not: still some overhead on getting knowing that the nesting level has abruptly changed.
IDEs
Sorry to admit it, but there is virtually no comfortable IDE for the blind. The closest to such an IDE is Microsoft Visual Studio, especially the latest version (gods bless Jenny Lay-Flurrie!), Android Studio seems also moving towards accessibility starting with version 2. However, these are not as usable, nifty and comfortable as they are for the sighted users. So, for instance, I use text editors and command-line tools to write, compile and debug my code, as do many blind people around me.
Ballad of the snake_case, or Another Holy War
Yet another thing to blame Python about: camelCase is far more comfortable to deal with then snake_case or even PascalCase. Usually screen readers separate words written in camelCase as if they were separated with spaces, so I get no pain readingThisPartOfSentence.
When you write code, you have to turn your punctuation on, otherwise you'll miss something really tiny and "unimportant", such as a quote, a semicolon or a parenthesis. Then, if your punctuation is on, and you read my_very_cool_descriptive_variable_name, you hear the following: "my underline very underline cool underline.... underline underline underline!!!" (bad language and swears censored). I tried even to replace underlines with sounds (yes, my screen reader gives such an opportunity), but the sounds can't be so well synchronized because of the higher speech rate I use. And it is quite a nightmare when dealing with methods and properties like __proto__ (aha, there are two underscores on both sides, not one, not three - well, got it right, I think!), __repr__ and so on, and so forth. Yes, you might say, I can replace the word "underline" with something really short like "un" (this is also possible), but some overhead is still here, as with white spaces and code nesting.
PascalCase is far better but it implies a bit more concentration, also, since we need to remember putting the first capital letter (oh, I'm too fastidious now, let it be PascalCase, but not those under... oh well, you got it already). This was the reason I gave up with Rust, btw.
Searching for Functions
As I have already told you, IDEs are not good for us, so text editor is our best friend. and then, you need to search for functions and methods, as well as for classes and code blocks. In certain languages (not Python this time), there are no keyword that would start a function (see, for example, C or Java code). Searching for functions in these conditions becomes quite painful if, for example, you do know that you have a logical error somewhere in the third or fourth function in the file, but you don't exactly remember its name, or you skim through someone's code... well, you know, there are lots of reasons to do that. In this particular context, Python is good, C is not.
Multiple Repeating and Alike Characters
This is not a problem per se, but a circumstance that complicates debugging, for example, regular expressions or strongly nested operations like ((((a + ((b * c) - d) ** e) / f) + g) - h. this particular example is really synthetic, but you get what I mean: nested ternary operators (that I love, btw!), conditional blocks, and so on. And regular expressions, again.
The Ideal Language
The closest to the ideal blind-friendly language as for me is the D language. The only drawback it has is absence of the word function except for anonymous functions. PHP and Javascript are also good, but they have tons of other, blind-unrelated drawbacks, unfortunately.
Update about Go
In one of his talks Rob Pike, the main developer of the Go language said that no one likes the code style imposed by the Gofmt utility. Probably, no one — except me! I like it, I love it so much, every file in Go is so concise and good to read, I'm really excited about the language because of that. The only slightly annoying thing for a blind coder is when a function has several pairs of parentheses in its definition, like if it is actually a struct method. the <- channel operator still gives me moments to think about what I'm doing, sending or receiving, but I believe it's a matter of habit.
Update about Visual Studio Code
Believe it or not, when I was writing this answer and the first update to it, I wasn't working as a full-time developer — now I am. So many circumstances went favorably for accessibility and me in particular! Slack, that virtually every business uses, became accessible, and so became Microsoft Visual Studio Code (again, gods bless Jenny and her team!). Now I use it as my primary code editor. Yes, it's not an IDE per se, but it's sufficient for my needs. And yes, I had to rework my punctuation reading: now I have shorter and often artificial names for many punctuation signs.
So, calling from end of January 2021, I definitely recommend Visual Studio Code as the coding editor for blind people and their colleagues. What is even more amazing is that LiveShare, their pair programming service, is also accessible! Yes, it does have some quirks (for now you can't tell what line in the file your colleague is editing if you're blind), but still it's an extremely huge step forward.
New to posting here on stackoverflow, so please forgive any transgresses that occur.
So a little background....
My grandfather is a current computer science professor at a university. I have always taken a great interest in computers, and have really grown into dealing with the hardware side of things. However, him being how he is, he wants to me to have a broader understanding of computing in general. Including coding/programming.
SO to my question.... He has given me a Key P5FW-93F6. He told me, that if I am able to make other keys "with the same value" he will give me a reward. So as I am trying to solve this problem, I haven't a clue where to start. In the beginning, I have entered the code, and followed the pattern of Letter, Number, Letter, Letter, etc. into excel and used the random value function.. However, none of these keys work in his program. He told me there is a massive amount of different "Keys" that will work but will not provide hints on to how to solve the problem. What language should I learn to solve this? Should I be looking for a hash value to be the same as the one key listed above? I am completely lost... any help would be appreciated!
Thanks!!
P.S. I do have an unlimited number of attempts, however only have one line that I can enter at a time. So I can't make batch entries.
As I got a lot of spare time to spend ATM I read a few threads/comments on code-comments and documentation here.
As most people here I too think that you should write your code so that it's easy to read and self-commenting as far as it's possible.
On the other hand I am a huge FP-fanboy - and yes if you write your code the right way it will be very readable in FP - or so I thought.
Problem is that tiny things make a awful lot of difference in FP-world. If your colleague doesn't fully understand FP he might be able to "read" the indentation of the code but won't be able to modify or fully understand it. That stands for languagues like Haskell, where a '.' or '$' makes a big difference and also for languages like F# or even C# of VB.NET with lots of LINQ statements.
At first glance the problem might be, that your peer just doesn't get the language and it's not the codes fault - on the other hand: who truly gets all of FP? Look at some papers concerning Haskell - the code is beautifully crafted and self-commenting but just as in math you may have to chew on a line for several minutes before you get it.
Of course in those papers there will be a text-block trying to clarify just after the code ....
So IMHO you have to comment your FP-code as long as you work in a shop where not every colleague has a PhD in CS ;)
What do you think?
PS: first post here - really looked for answers concerning this questions but didn't find any - please be gentle if I just didn't look hard enough :)
Functional languages greatly favor the development of self-documenting code, because you can freely rearrange the order of functions, and easily abstract out any given part of the code, assigning it an explanatory name.
Abstract, abstract, abstract, is the keyword to master code complexity, and that's where the functional style shines. But there will be always things that cannot be expressed within the code itself.
One clear example is code for algorithms. It is unlikely that one can easily understand a complex algorithm just by looking at the implementation. Yes, functional languages make understanding simpler, becasue many gory details (trivial example: memory management) do not have to be coded explicitly, thus exposing the underlying logic more clearly.
However this is no substitute for an explanation in natural language, which conveys in an intuitive way how it works (and sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words). This is becasue our brain needs to observe difficult concepts from different point of views in order to understand them fully.
What to comment also depends on your audience. Beginners, average programmers or wizards? There is no one-fits-all solution.
E.g. you should explain the meaning of a "." (function composition) in Haskell if you are writing tutorial code, but certainly that would be a redundant explanation for anyone who has gone past chapter one/two of any Haskell book.
On the other hand some specific algorithm, like say red-black trees, could be a given for some programmers, and something very mysterious for others. In the second case you should add many comments to the code, or point to a document with further explanations.
Finally, one should notice that there is no consensus even among the masters. E.g. Dennis Ritchie is famous for being extremely parsimonious with comments, instead Don Knuth is an advocate of "Literate programming", where comments are as important as code itself. A set of rules will never be a substitute for personal taste.
I'm writing some children's Math Education software for a class.
I'm going to try and present problems to students of varying skill level with randomly generated math problems of different types in fun ways.
One of the frustrations of using computer based math software is its rigidity. If anyone has taken an online Math class, you'll know all about the frustration of taking an online quiz and having your correct answer thrown out because your problem isn't exactly formatted in their form or some weird spacing issue.
So, originally I thought, "I know! I'll use an expression parser on the answer box so I'll be able to evaluate anything they enter and even if it isn't in the same form I'll be able to check if it is the same answer." So I fire up my IDE and start implementing the Shunting Yard Algorithm.
This would solve the problem of it not taking fractions in the smallest form and other issues.
However, It then hit me that a tricky student would simply be able to enter most of the problems into the answer box and my expression parser would dutifully parse and evaluate it to the correct answer!
So, should I not be using an expression parser in this instance? Do I really have to generate a single form of the answer and do a string comparison?
One possible solution is to note how many steps your expression evaluator takes to evaluate the problem's original expression, and to compare this to the optimal answer. If there's too much difference, then the problem hasn't been reduced enough and you can suggest that the student keep going.
Don't be surprised if students come up with better answers than your own definition of "optimal", though! I was a TA/grader for several classes, and the brightest students routinely had answers on their problem sets that were superior to the ones provided by the professor.
For simple problems where you're looking for an exact answer, then removing whitespace and doing a string compare is reasonable.
For more advanced problems, you might do the Shunting Yard Algorithm (or similar) but perhaps parametrize it so you could turn on/off reductions to guard against the tricky student. You'll notice that "simple" answers can still use the parser, but you would disable all reductions.
For example, on a division question, you'd disable the "/" reduction.
This is a great question.
If you are writing an expression system and an evaluation/transformation/equivalence engine (isn't there one available somewhere? I am almost 100% sure that there is an open source one somewhere), then it's more of an education/algebra problem: is the student's answer algebraically closer to the original expression or to the expected expression.
I'm not sure how to answer that, but just an idea (not necessarily practical): perhaps your evaluation engine can count transformation steps to equivalence. If the answer takes less steps to the expected than it did to the original, it might be ok. If it's too close to the original, it's not.
You could use an expression parser, but apply restrictions on the complexity of the expressions permitted in the answer.
For example, if the goal is to reduce (4/5)*(1/2) and you want to allow either (2/5) or (4/10), then you could restrict the set of allowable answers to expressions whose trees take the form (x/y) and which also evaluate to the correct number. Perhaps you would also allow "0.4", i.e. expressions of the form (x) which evaluate to the correct number.
This is exactly what you would (implicitly) be doing if you graded the problem manually -- you would be looking for an answer that is correct but which also falls into an acceptable class.
The usual way of doing this in mathematics assessment software is to allow the question setter to specify expressions/strings that are not allowed in a correct answer.
If you happen to be interested in existing software, there's the open-source Stack http://www.stack.bham.ac.uk/ (or various commercial options such as MapleTA). I suspect most of the problems that you'll come across have also been encountered by Stack so even if you don't want to use it, it might be educational to look at how it approaches things.