First, you need to understand what a constructed language Formal Language is. All programming languages are constructed formal languages (read the reference). You may then read a little bit about compiler construction, including this reference as well. Going back to your question, consider this: The English language (a natural language) has tokens ‘A-Z/0-9/,;”…’ which we … Read more
While this question borders on being outside the scope of Stack Overflow, I highly recommend the Wikipedia article on the matter: The History of Foobar To give a quick preview: The word foo originated as a nonsense word from the 1930s, the military term FUBAR emerged in the 1940s… The term foo fighter was used … Read more
To me, a more modern example of spaghetti code is when you have 20 dlls and every DLL references each other in one way or another. Your dependency graph looks like a huge blob, and your code hops all over the place with no real order. Everything is inter-dependent.
Genetic algorithms (GA) are search algorithms that mimic the process of natural evolution, where each individual is a candidate solution: individuals are generally “raw data” (in whatever encoding format has been defined). Genetic programming (GP) is considered a special case of GA, where each individual is a computer program (not just “raw data”). GP explore … Read more
Contrary to most answers, I do not believe that “presently unneeded functionality” is over-engineering; or it is the least problematic form. Like you said, the worst kind of over-engineering is usually committed in the name of future-proofing and extensibility – and achieves the exact opposite: Empty layers of abstraction that are at best unnecessary and … Read more
Traditionally a program is compiled and a script is interpreted, but that is not really important anymore. You can generate a compiled version of most scripts if you really want to, and other ‘compiled’ languages like Java are in fact interpreted (at the byte code level.) A more modern definition might be that a program … Read more
A web service will be running on a web server. A web server is a piece of software designed to serve web pages/web sites/web services. Examples are IIS, Apache and many more. The name can also refer to the hardware running this software. As web service will be running inside a web server – normally … Read more
Until we get a post from someone who really knows, here’s my understanding to the question, FWIW. A subroutine and a function are essentially the same thing, with one difference: A function returns some sort of value (usually via the stack or CPU register), while a subroutine does not. Whether subroutine or function, it is … Read more
It’s a behavior produced by code which may be relied on by consuming code, though that behavior is not specified by the spec the code is written to. Hence, other implementations of the same spec may not exhibit the same behavior, and will break that consuming code. That’s why it’s bad to rely on them. … Read more
Issue tracking systems usually integrate more with customers and customer issues. An issue could be “help me install this” or “How do I get the fubar into the flim flam.” They could even be something like “I need an evalutation key for your software”. Bug tracking systems help you keep track of wrong or missing … Read more