Awk is a very nice language with a very strange name. In this first article of a three-part series, Daniel Robbins will quickly get your awk programming skills up to speed. As the series progresses, more advanced topics will be covered, culminating with an advanced real-world awk application demo.

Snap! is a broadly inviting programming language for kids and adults that’s also a platform for serious study of computer science.

Snap! is now a community website where you can share and publish projects so others can find and remix them, and where you can ask questions and discuss the beauty and joy of computing. We invite you to check out the new site. Did you know that you can embed Snap! projects in other web pages?

We've also enhanced the programming language, making it easier to discover and to use powerful blocks for analyzing data and transforming media.

V is a programming language that has been hyped a lot. As it’s recently had its first alpha release, I figured it would be a good idea to step through it and see if it lives up to the promises that the author has been claiming for months.

As far as I can tell, all of the above features are either “work-in-progress” or completely absent from the source repository.

What does debugging a program look like?

Simple, fast, safe, compiled programming language.

Nice approach. Still not mature.

StackOverflow is the de facto standard place to go when you need to figure out how to do something as a programmer. A web search for information about how to check the number of lines in a file using the C programming language will probably give you StackOverflow questions as the most relevant search results. Unfortunately, while writing good, clean, reliable C does not need to be difficult, it is certainly difficult to find information about how to do it well, and the people answering these questions on StackOverflow are not filtered by their skills or knowledge of good practices. From time to time, the top-rated answer or the accepted answer is even the worst answer that addresses the question.

The best example I have seen of a straightforward line count algorithm is in a place that might seem obvious after the fact: the source code of the wc command line utility. Figure out how the -l option is handled in a good implementation of wc, and all that's left is to adapt it to your needs. Ideally, the solution you find should be short, simple, careful (e.g. checking for error conditions), robust, well-worn, and well-formatted.

The C coding standards of the OpenBSD community are among the highest and most pragmatic you'll ever find, and when someone makes a decision about implementation whose reasoning is not pretty obvious in the code itself you're almost certain to see that reasoning clearly documented in code comments, which can also teach you something about being a good programmer in general.

I like Python, but wish it had static typing. The added safety would go a long way to improving quality and reducing development time. So today I tried to make use of type annotations and a static …

SCons is an Open Source software construction tool - that is, a next-generation build tool. Think of SCons as an improved, cross-platform substitute for the classic Make utility with integrated functionality similar to autoconf/automake and compiler caches such as ccache. In short, SCons is an easier, more reliable and faster way to build software.

We wish to take an array of 32 million 64bit floating point values, and compute the sum of their squares. This will let us explore some fundamental abilities of various languages. Their ability to iterate over arrays efficiently, whether they can vectorize basic loops, and whether higher order functions like map and reduce compile to efficient code. When applicable, I will show runtimes of both map and reduce, so we get insight into whether the language can stream higher order functions together, and also the runtime with a single reduce or fold operation.

I marker this article as "funny" since I can not believe it is serious. Or at least I'm missing something...

We often have to write code using  permissive programming languages like C and C++. They tend to generate hard-to-debug problems that can crash your applications. Thankfully, many compilers offer “sanitizers”. I discussed them in my post No more leaks with sanitize flags in gcc and clang. I strongly encourage the use of sanitizers as I think it is the modern way to write C and C++. When many people describe how impossibly difficult it is to build good software in C and C++, they often think about old-school bare metal C and C++ where the code do all sorts of mysterious things without any protection. Then they feel compelled to run their code in a debugger and to manually run through it. You should not write code this way! Get some tools! Sanitizers can catch undefined behaviour, memory leaks, buffer overflows, data races, and so forth.

Which built-ins should you know about?

I estimate most Python developers will only ever need about 30 built-in functions, but which 30 depends on what you’re actually doing with Python.

We’re going to take a look at all 69 of Python’s built-in functions, in a birds eye view sort of way.

GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

Vim 8.1 was released about a year ago, in May 2018. The “main new feature” was official support for running a terminal within vim. Along with this came a built-in debugger plugin, termd…

Interesting consideration on the usage of setvbuf in a C program.

I do the bulk of my code reviews from the command line, especially when reviewing larger changes. I've built up a number of tools and config settings …

Calculating the mean of a list of numbers Consider the following problem:

You have a list of floating point numbers. No nasty tricks - these
aren’t NaN or Infinity, just normal “simple” floating point numbers.

Now: Calculate the mean (average). Can you do it?

It turns out this is a hard problem. It’s hard to get it even close to right. Lets see why.

Data structure and algorithms are core part of any Programming job interview. It doesn't matter whether you are a C++ developer, a Java developer or a Web developer working in JavaScript, Angular, React, or Query. As a computer science graduate, its expected from a programmer to have strong knowledge of both basic data structures e.g. array, linked list, binary tree, hash table, stack, queue and advanced data structures like the binary heap, trie, self-balanced tree, circular buffer etc. I have taken a lot of Java interviews for both junior and senior positions in the past, and I have been also involved in interviewing C++ developer. One difference which I have clearly noticed between a C++ and a Java developer is their understanding and command of Data structure and algorithms.

On average, a C or C++ developer showed a better understanding and application of data structure and their coding skill was also better than Java developers. This is not a coincidence though. As per my experience, there is a direct correlation between a programmer having a good command of the algorithm also happens to be a good developer and coder.

I firmly believe that interview teaches you a lot in very short time and that's why I am sharing some frequently asked Data structure and algorithm questions from various Java interviews.

If you are familiar with them than try to solve them by hand and if you do not then learn about them first, and then solve them. If you need to refresh your knowledge of data structure and algorithms then you can also take help from a good book our course like Data Structures and Algorithms: Deep Dive Using Java for quick reference.

For coding interview preparation, LeetCode is one of the best online resource providing a rich library of more than 300 real coding interview questions for you to practice from using one of the 7 supported languages - C, C++, Java, Python, C#, JavaScript, Ruby.