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Use Stirling's Approximation to estimate N! for larger N.
ln(n!) = n ln(n) - n + O(ln(n))
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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I used the calculator that comes as part of Windows (in Scientific mode)
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I had a boss one time who personally disliked wizard type interfaces in software. He disliked them so much that he used to design screens and dialog boxes with every step of a multistep process presented all at once. That's right, every button, every textbox, every checkbox that you might encounter in a multistep process all on screen at the same time.
It was extremely difficult to make this work when there were many steps in the particular screen being developed. There were just way too many different states that the screen could be in at any one time to be manageable.
Have you ever had a boss who placed unrealistic constraints on your work? And what were some of those constraints?
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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As a general rule I dislike wizards as well, but I prefer to keep my dialogs simpler. The problem with wizard interfaces is they tend to be too many dialogs.
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Wizards use a step by step process to accomplish a finished state.
Just a flow chart.
The granularity is usually the rub.
Too many steps, the user loses scope and/or trajectory.
Too few and the user is not satisfied with customization.
So how many steps is enough? 1, 2 ...
The point is a "Wizard" of some kind is needed.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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I am but a humble user. Yesterday I filled in a satisfaction survey for Argos, which claimed to be quite short. Some of the boxes I checked produced further lists of checkboxes. I started to lose patience, and eventually by experiment chose options which did not produce further checkboxes, in order to finish the thing. Some of the extra checkboxes included questions which had already been asked anyway.
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Often my boss has "simple ideas" that turn into a real nightmare to realize, one of them was combining all config files of our Windows applications in C# into one master config file.
Very handy for the guys of support was his reasoning, but not so handy to realize sadly.
I made a clunky implementation with mutexes that will guarantee trouble in the future when new inexperienced developers will have to write applications for this mess ...
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I actually work for a guy like that. I live in the UI, and many times he'll walk in and ask for this "one little change" which is cataclysmic to my code base (I refuse to willingly bastardize the code).
Interestingly, most of the time this is a requirements issue - he has an idea and hasn't completely conveyed to me what problem we're solving. The ultimate agile development ....
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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I had a boss that asked me to remove an empty lines from all .c, .cpp files for better performance.
Another boss liked to remove all comments from the source code, because good code should be self-descriptive.
Finally, I managed to get an exclusive permission from both of them, to use empty lines and write comments.
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Nuke them from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
GCS/GE d--(d) s-/+ a C+++ U+++ P-- L+@ E-- W+++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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Okay, that's not design, it's just ignorance.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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charlieg wrote: Okay, that's not design, it's just ignorance.
Morons also need to make design. Otherwise, who will design Python programs?
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I've made plenty of screens like that.
I work (and worked) for meat processing factories.
A piece of meat comes on a line, which has all sort of properties, like weight, multiple quality marks, color, birth-, slaughter-, and fattening countries...
So the worker scans the label and I fill out all of those fields, if possible, but if slaughter country is in a list of countries then you can edit some field, if it goes to (or comes from) some country or even specific customer they have to fill out another property, if the quality is AA then... etc.
The worker really needs to see all the information at once because they can't make informed decisions without all the data.
I've had a screen where each piece of meat (the individual cuts) was a row in a grid and each row had about 100 columns and the state of each column depended on a combination of sales order, sales order line, loading order, loading order line, production order, production order line, and a plethora of master data (like properties on the specific product, customer, country or packaging).
Those were screens with some thousand lines of if-else branches and some people knew all of them (mostly different laws per country and such) 
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Sander Rossel wrote: The worker really needs to see all the information at once because they can't make informed decisions without all the data
Hmmm....could be me but I see a difference there....
Yours: "The worker"
Original post: "boss"
Yours of course is customer and requirements driven.
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My point was more that a form with plenty of fields and states is not an "unrealistic constraint", but a functional reality 
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I know. Yours is that the users need that. The other (not your post) is how the boss wants it.
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Richard Andrew x64 wrote: Have you ever had a boss who placed unrealistic constraints on your work?
Not so much a boss as internal users. Our product is a commercial ink-jet printing system, and our application runs the machine. I do our user interfaces, which are the control panel for this $2M+ piece of equipment.
My ongoing problem is this. The mechanical, electrical, chemical, and service engineers love adding decisions to the user's workload. They want the user to decide whether they want to use mode X or mode Y when performing process A. When performing process Q, should we stop when condition C23 or C27.2 is detected? In a running joke in the group, they always suggest "Can't you just display a popup?". This is on a machine that must have certain operations always available (like STOP) and displaying a modal message box or task dialog is only reasonable in very select cases. The more important issue is that the user is a machine operator, and he simply doesn't care; he just wants to print.
I spend ¾ of my time figuring out how to not add buttons or knobs. Many times the decision they're asking for is for their own debugging purposes, so those get added to an engineering section of the UI that isn't displayed in customer installations. If the decision is one they make once for the customer installation, it's made part of the configuration loaded at startup. Most of the remaining decisions I have to present and place so that they don't interfere with normal operations, but are where the user will find if needed. Every so often I get lucky, and after taking a pick-axe to the engineer's brain, figure out how to make the decision within the application without involving the user.
When sales/marketing and management get involved this is harder. They like to dictate a particular solution ("can't you just display a popup?") and if they don't see that, they throw a conniption because you haven't done what they've asked. The advantage of being a Wise Old Head is that you become adept at explaining the benefits of your solution over the one they mandated, and doing so in a way that smooths their ruffled feathers.
Software Zen: delete this;
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You could write the Caption: "Pop up brought to you by XXYYZZ decission".
I bet that after one of those popups come to production the petitions of popups from that person or department would be drastically less pretty soon.
And yes... I did something similar once.  
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Gary R. Wheeler wrote: I spend ¾ of my time figuring out how to not add buttons or knobs.
I think it was Pascal (the man, not the language) that said "I'm sorry I didn't have more time too write a shorter letter". People don't appreciate how much effort goes into making a smaller user interface.
My story: I had to design a data acquisition system used on boats with many different sensors from many different manufacturers that rarely have been able to work together in a smooth combination. My choice was to make the configuration part quite complicated with many different options that had to be set correctly in order for the system to run. The data acquisition part, by comparison, was child's play with very few options or controls. The idea was that you would solve all the complicated problems while moored and with time on your hands while out on the water you had better things to do than fiddle with a finicky program.
The program was a success and users loved it. Years have passed, many people have passed through marketing and bosses of many users have seen the program at trade shows. Each one came with a great idea like: "Can we see this in 3D?" (yes you could but than you cannot measure anything on screen) "Can we change color of each thing on screen?" (seriously? who has time to play with colors while running a boat?) and so on.
On top of that, some of my colleagues added new features and sometimes, instead of putting the effort to make a sound design decision, they just went "oh, let the user decide what he wants. We'll just add check-boxes for the different options."
Mircea
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Mircea Neacsu wrote: "oh, let the user decide what he wants. We'll just add check-boxes for the different options."
I've had to do that one far more often than I like. 
Software Zen: delete this;
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On the desktop app I work on, we have an admin section for that stuff. Let the manager decide. The actual users never have to care.
Bond
Keep all things as simple as possible, but no simpler. -said someone, somewhere
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If the wizard evolution is linear it’s easy to present everything at once in one big menu of options. If all the possible options evolve into a tree (early options attract further changes down the chain ) showing all the options at once is difficult or impossible
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Richard Andrew x64 wrote: It was extremely difficult to make this work when there were many steps in the particular screen being developed. There were just way too many different states that the screen could be in at any one time to be manageable.
Disaster in the making. If you have a hard time, how's the end user supposed to make sense of it?
Maybe group the related controls that are on each page, so that what used to be one page, is now inside its own user control. So if the wizard had 6 pages, you have 6 user controls, all dropped on the same window as your boss wants it. As far as he'll be able to tell, it's all one page, but internally, at least, everything within each control will be wrapped in its own file/class. That should make it more manageable...?
And just to mess with him - initialize the window so only the first control is enabled - disable (gray out) the other controls. Once those are filled in correctly and validated, disable control #1 and enable control #2, until you've gone through all user controls. Hey, he can't call it a wizard...
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Just a thought: would it help to convince him to use what he asked for in a real-life scenario?
- thus make a serious use case evaluation ...
I wonder what would be his answer. Perhaps "no, it's too complex", "no, too much work" ... 
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Richard Andrew x64 wrote: I had a boss one time who personally disliked wizard type interfaces in software.
It doesn't matter what your boss at the time (who I assumed was some sort of engineering manager) liked or didn't like. What matters is what the customer wanted. But I assume he probably wasn't smart enough to realize that. 
/ravi
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