Month: May 2009

Reasons for voting on questions and answers

By jonskeet

I’ve recently been involved in a few discussions around voting on Stack Overflow, and I think my own "policy" around it may be different to that of others. I thought it would be worth sharing why I personally vote items up or down, and hear your thoughts too. This blog may not be the ideal venue for such a post, but until such time as we have a real "meta" site for Stack Overflow (such as Stack Overflow Overflow) I can’t think of anywhere better to write about it. Readers who are only interested in coding should move on; I … Continue reading Reasons for voting on questions and answers

A different approach to inappropriate defaults

By jonskeet

I’ve had a couple of bug reports about my Protocol Buffers port – both nicely detailed, and one including a patch to fix it. (It’s only due to my lack of timeliness in actually submitting the change that the second bug report occurred. Oops.) The bug was in text formatting (although it also affected parsing). I was using the default ToString behaviour for numbers, which meant that floats and doubles were being formatted as "50,15" in Germany instead of "50.15". The unit tests caught this, but only if you ran them on a machine with an appropriate default culture. Aaargh. … Continue reading A different approach to inappropriate defaults

Language proliferation

By jonskeet

I’ve always been aware that .NET supports multiple languages (obviously) and that Microsoft has been experimenting with this to some extent. It’s only recently struck me just to what extent this is the case though. Here’s a list – almost certainly incomplete – of .NET languages from Microsoft alone. C# VB (or VB.NET if you wish) C++/CLI F# IronPython IronRuby Spec# M (with Oslo) Axum Managed JScript PowerShell Cω J# (not shipping any more, I believe) Some of these are research languages which are more important for the ideas they’ve contributed to more mainstream ones at a later date than … Continue reading Language proliferation