What is the best programming language for beginners?
This study attempts to provide a more nuanced answer than “JavaScript”, from an educator’s perspective.
“Heap, Heap, Array!”
Storing trees in a database table
Relational databases are very good at storing tabular data, but what if you need to store arbitrarily-sized trees?
How to deal with Dutch compound words when processing text
The Dutch have a lot of long words that aren’t in dictionaries. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re hard to read for Dutch people.
Is there a time and place for single-letter variable names?
We are often told that variable names should be meaningful and avoid abbreviations, yet some variables are simply named “k”. What gives?
Casting doubt on the ability of tools to measure technical debt
Numbers produced by technical debt tools tell a tale, but it’s largely fictional.
What do regular expression bugs look like?
This study gives us a better understanding of the practical problems faced by developers when using regular expressions.
Do Java developers write better Python? Studying off-language code quality on GitHub
What happens when you let Java and C++ developers write Python code?
Does code structure affect comprehension? On using and naming intermediate variables
The answer is not “yes” or “no”, but somewhere in between. Who would’ve guessed?
What it would take to use mutation testing in industry – A study at Facebook
Mutation testing is useful, but not many developers use it. What steps can we take to increase adoption?
When and how to JOIN a table with itself
Relational databases make it very easy to join data from different tables, but did you know you can also JOIN data within the same table?
How do you number SELECT query results using SQL?
Want to let number or rank your query results? Let your database do the hard work for you.
Old habits die hard: Why refactoring for understandability does not give immediate benefits
Refactoring code improves code maintainability, reusability, and other “ilities”, but does not speed up development – at least not at first.
How to run PHPUnit tests in PhpStorm
A tutorial for people who keep forgetting how to run PHPUnit tests using PhpStorm.
Measuring programming experience
Studies about programming often need to control for programming experience. What’s the best way to do that?
An empirical validation of cognitive complexity as a measure of source code understandability
There’s a new way to measure the understandability of your source code and this time it actually seems to work reasonably well.
MDX: The good, the bad, and the ugly
If you have your own blog and like the simplicity of Markdown, but don’t want to give up JSX, you may want to give MDX a try.
When testing meets code review: Why and how developers review tests
Why do developers find it so hard to review test code?
Are static analysis violations really fixed?
Static analysis tools are often used to find inconsistencies and possible bugs in code. But what happens next?
Allonsay’s language classification algorithm
How you can detect the language of texts, without using the “ML” word.
Finding the most common words in a set of texts for a word cloud
Alternatively: why word counting is nothing like bean counting.
(Not) looping over lists in PHP
This post discusses three common array functions: map, reduce, and filter.
Scalable transfer patterns
Path finding algorithms for public transport take a little bit more work to get right than those for private transport.
Understanding large-scale software – A hierarchical view
Program comprehension often focusses on the understanding of code, but in practice that often won’t be enough.
Practitioners’ views on good software testing practices
A look at some best practices for software testing.