About Programming

It's not that we don't have enough time.
It's that we have too much to do.
- Chet Hendrickson

Project Management

Some Programming Paradigms

We've talked during our sessions of the paradigms of programming and some people were unclear on their meanings. Python is a multi-paradigm language and you may encounter some of these..

Imperative (Fortran, C)

States "how" the computation is to take place, versus "what" is to be computed.

Procedural (C/C++, Fortran)

Functional (Lisp-like)

Emphasizes the evaluation of expressions rather than the execution of commands. This means that a program, written in a functional programming language, consists of a set function definitions and an expression, whose value is output as the program’s result. A 3-part tutorial about functional programming in Python.

Object-Oriented

Logic/Declarative (Prolog, SQL)

Aspect-Oriented

Deal with one aspect at a time (performance, parallelism, replication, etc.)

Subject-Oriented

A subject is a collection of classes.

Intentional

Don't bother with syntax; express intentions.

Terms Debated During Some of Our Sessions

impedance mismatch

tail recursion

closure

An abstraction representing a function, plus the lexical environment (see static scoping) in which the function was created. A Tutorial in Ruby

currying (named after Haskell Curry)

A tutorial about currying arguments in Python.

Forms of Program Abstraction

• Data - encapsulation, first-class types
• Functional - first-class functions, closures
• Syntactic - macros, overloading
• Control - macros and high-order functions
• Design process - abstract away files, dela with phases of project, explicit development process
• Resource - separate what it takes to do it from what is done
• Storage - garbage collection, no new operator, slot access and function calls have same syntax

Unit Testing Resources

• http://www.xprogramming.com
• http://mockobjects.com
• http://easymock.org