I teach programming in high school. In the past, when I looked at a program and knew it was plagiarized, I could google the name of the program (e.g. name of a common game) and track down the code, and sometimes I could literally google some lines of the code and find the source. That doesn't work anymore. Lines of code just turn up nothing, and names often result in dozens of youtube tutorials.
Please note, I'm not looking for tools to compare two snippets of code. I'm looking for ways to search for code online that matches my student's code that I believe is plagiarized. Most of the plagiarized code I see is in either python or c++.
I would be so grateful if there's someone out there who can help me outsmart my cheaters.
My teachers were using this and it worked pretty good, if that can help. (Although it doesn't detect the source, only tells if there are similarities from what I know)
I am trying to understand some old Excel VBA code. I would like to create a call graph to help.
Quite some time ago, in other programming languages, I had a lot of success with things like VCG, but I don't know enough about VBA to decide whether such a thing is even feasible. And so far my results of searches like Excel and graph have been difficult to sift. There doesn't seem to be anything here on SO associating Excel or VBA with the existing call-graph tag.
There are some commercial products that will do this analysis.
http://www.vbdepend.com/
But you might also consider Rubberduck-VBA. It doesn't make graphs (yet), but it does do a thorough job of analyzing your code. And it's free and open-source.
Disclaimer - I'm a contributor on Rubberduck.
I'm on a Mac with OS 10.11.6 and I'm using Sage 7.2's notebook interface. I did things in Mathematica that I want to check in Sage, but I'm a beginner at Sage. In Mathematica it's possible to keep track of the execution of my code, especially to detect when it's hanging, by using the Mathematica Dynamic[] command. Is there anything like this command in Sage, or is there perhaps another way to track the progress of the execution of a lengthy computation that will let me know in real time if and when it hangs? At the moment I insert print commands in my code that result in thousands of tuples of values of a tuple of variables streaming vertically down my screen. Messy. I'd rather see the values of such a tuple simply update in place as they do, say, on a digital clock. This is what Dynamic[] achieves in Mathematica.
Well, Mathematica doesn't have a debugger. So they tried to overcome this obstacle by introducing the Dynamic[] command. But when a programming language does have a debugger, why bother implementing something similar to Dynamic?
There are some ways to debug a sage code, you can refer to this other post for example. Also there is a built-in command, trace, that does a pretty similar job to Dynamic in Mathematica.
You can also refer to this (seemingly old) post for further information.
I looked at the user guide http://docs.jboss.org/optaplanner/release/6.1.0.Final/optaplanner-docs/html_single/index.html#d0e2669
I looked at the example code from git, but still feel quite lost about how to model my planning problem (for example some special TSP variant, let's say TSPTW ). the way OptaPlanner user code is structured is that the user code is devided into several packages, and there is not a entire "end-to-end" flow of code, and as a developer I only see these "modules" , sort of. So as a result it's very difficult for me to figure out how to connect the dots, and how these "dots" interact together to accomplish the overall algorithm task.
the section in the link above "Model your planning problem " sort of touches on the above question I have, but still seems out of sync with the example code, so it's difficult to figure out how the current examples work, also it's difficult for me to see how to add my own special logic for the TSP variant .
is there a better "code walk-through" document to show the usage of the framework?
thanks
Yang
Take a look here this guy create a simple optaplanner project to test some concepts and learn how to use it.
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I'm not a full-time software guy. In fact, in the last ten years, 90 % of my work was either on the hardware or doing low-level (embedded) code.
But the other 10% involves writing shell scripts for development tools, making kernel changes to add special features, and writing GUI applications for end-users.
The problem is that I find myself facing significant holes in my knowledge, often because it's been years since I've done "X", and I've either forgotten, or the environment has changed.
Every so often, there are threads on TheDailyWTF.com along the lines of "WTF: the guy spent all day writing tons of code, when he could have called foobar() in library baz". I've been there myself, because I don't remember much beyond the #include <stdio.h> stuff (for example), and my quick search somehow missed the right library.
What methods have you found effective to crash-learn and/or crash-refresh yourself in programming environments that you rarely touch?
Ask developers you know that work in the environment that you are interested in.
Search the web a lot.
Ask specific questions in relevant IRC channels (Freenode is great).
Ask specific questions on StackOverflow and other sites.
There really isn't any substitue for being "in the daily flow" of the programming environment in question. Having a good feel for the current state of the art is something you only get from experience, as I'm sure you can verify in you own areas of expertise.
i try to keep up with general news about languages i'm interested in but aren't necessarily using at the moment. being able to follow the general changes helps a lot for when you have to pick it up again.
beyond that, i personally find it easiest to grab an up to date reference book, and code a few basic things to get me used to the environment again, ie as a web programmer i'd make a simple crud app, or a quick web service/client.
For frameworks/APIs (such as a JavaScript framework or a widget library):
Quickly scan through the entire API documentation; get a glimpse of all that's out there instead of picking the first method that seems to fit your needs.
If available, glance at the source code of the
framework to see how the
API was intended to be used. Seeing what's behind the curtain helps. And also
some of the methods will have been used
internally, showcasing their true intents.
Don't necessarily always trust existing code (Googled, from co-workers, from books) since not everyone does the due diligence to find out the most proper way to use an API. Sometimes even samples in API documentation can be out-of-date.
In newer full-featured environments like Java, .NET, and Python, there are library solutions to almost every common problem. Don't think "how can I program this in plain C", but "which library solves this problem for me?" It's an attitude shift. As far as resources, the library documentation for the three environments I mentioned are all good.
The best solution I think is to get a book on the topic / environment you need to catch up on.
Ask questions from developers who you know who have the experience in that area.
You can also check out news groups (Google Groups makes this easy) and forums. You can ask questions, but even reading 10 minutes of the latest popular questions for a particular topic / environment will keep you a little bit "in the know".
The same thing can go for blogs too if you can find a focussed blog. These are pretty rare though and I personally don't look to blogs to keep me "in the know" on a particular environment. (I personally find blogs most popular and interesting in the "here's something neat" or "here's how I failed and you can avoid it" or "general practice" areas.)
In addition to the answers above, I think what you are asking for will take a significant amount of your time, and you must be willing to spend that time to achieve your goals. My method would be pretty much the same as Owen's answer; get a reference book or tutorial and work through the examples hacking in changes as you go to experiment with how any given thing works. I'd say as a bare minimum, allocate a hour to do this every other day, in a time that you know you won't be interrupted. Any less, and you'll probably continue to struggle.
The best way to crash-learn is simple, simply do it, use google to search for X tutorial, open your favorite browser and start typing away. Once you reached a certain level of feeling with X, do look at other people things, there is lots of open source out there and there must be someboby who has used X before, look at how they solved certain problems and learn from this, this is an easy way to verify that you are 'on the right track' or that you're doing things or thinking in patterns that other people would define as 'common sense'.
Crash-refreshing something is much easier since you have a suspended learning curve already, the way I do this is to keep some of the example you did while writing or keep some projects you did. Then you can easily refresh and use your own examples.
The library issue you mention here well, only improving your search skills will improve that one (although looking on how others solved this will help as well)
Don't try and pick up every environment.
Focus on the one that's useful and/or interesting, and then pick a few quality blogs to regularly read or podcasts to listen to. You'll pick up the current state of the environment fairly quickly.
Concrete example: I've been out of the Java world for a long time, but I've been put on a Java project in the last few months. Since then I've listened to the Java Posse podcast and read a few blogs, and although I'm far from a Java guru I've got back up to speed without too much trouble.
Just a though. While we are working on our code we know that we need to work very hard to optimize the critical path, but on non critical path we usually don't spend to much effort to optimize.
From your description you are working 90% on embedded and 10% on rest, lets assume that in 50% of the rest you are spending more time that needed. So according to my calculation you are optimizing about 5% of your work flow ...
Of course the usual google/SO/forums search is useful before you doing something new, but investing more than just that is waste of time for my opinion, unless you want to waste some time just for fun or general education ... :), but this is another story.
By the way I'm in same position and last time i needed some GUI and used MFC (because i used it sometimes 10 years ago :) ) and i perfectly understand that i probably will get better results with C# and friends, but the learning curve just not justify this especially knowing that i need mix the C code with GUI.