Introduction

The human brain is basically an organic computer inside our heads. Completely unique and mysterious, the brain is the hardware that processes both external and internal information, stores it, and later recalls the information in order to utilize it for decision-making and future planning. It is the motherboard that controls everything that is “you”, from your physical body and movements, to your innermost thoughts and emotions. This is done through the use of compartmentalized systems, or individual components built into the structures of your brain, each of which is responsible for carrying out certain functionalities. The main two are the…

How to Create a New Programming Language

What does building a programming language require?

The concept of writing a brand new programming language is a foreign one to most programmers. There isn’t a high demand for new languages, so programmers are, for the most part, taught and trained in languages which already exist; there is little need to learn how to create a new one. Building a language actually consists of building a compiler. Compilers process code into a form that can be interpreted by a computer. On top of building a compiler, in order to create an entire programming language, the author must make decisions regarding the pattern and syntax. Much of this…

Introduction

There is some general misunderstanding in regards to the differences between mobile applications and web applications — which I will refer to from here on as ‘app’ and ‘web app’. They are even sometimes mistakenly thought of as being one and the same, when in fact, they are vastly different. This is the case all around, from the developers’ perspective, all the way to the end users’ point of view. Many of these dissimilarities are subtle by nature, and often times you could use either-or to build an online service or tool, making it difficult to decide which one would…

What is Go?

The game of ‘Go’ is believed to be the oldest, continuously played board game in the world. It was invented in China, over 2,500 years ago, and is still wildly popular to this day. A survey taken in 2016 found there to be around 20 million Go players worldwide, though they mostly live in Asia. The game board uses a grid system, and requires two players. Each player places either black or white “stones” on the board, one after another. If player A surrounds player B’s stone(s), then any surrounded stone is removed from the board, and later factors in…

What is CAPTCHA?

The term CAPTCHA is actually a contrived acronym, meaning it was chosen deliberately because it is apt for what it is naming. CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing [test to tell] Computers [and] Humans Apart. The term was first used by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper, and John Langford in 2003. At its core, CAPTCHAs are a a form of challenge-response test. Sometimes, when trying to access certain portions of a website, you may encounter a CAPTCHA before you are granted access. A test is presented to you, and your entrance to the page is decided…

All about the architecture of modern web applications

The internet has become quite the force in the modern age. While this holds true in more ways than one, its bread and butter is undoubtably the website. So easy it is to take for granted the dynamism of the sites we use every day, but an enormous amount of progress has been made since the days of static webpages. A static webpage means that each time a change should be made, likely due to user interaction, a brand new page must replace the current one. Each page is contained as its…

Accessing a website, any website, is something that most people take for granted, specifically in terms of all the necessary procedures that happen behind the scenes. These procedures make it possible to surf the web quickly and securely. Multiple entities, including your own machine, are utilized to complete this process. Not to mention that all the steps, from the point at which they initialize, to their completion, must occur quickly; very quickly. Fractions of a second separate a functional website, and one deemed to be unusable. These operations are what make the internet, as we know it today, possible.

Access Granted

Have…

CODEX

All About Binary Search Trees in Javascript

Structural Integrity

Programming and data storage go hand-in-hand. There are many different schools of thought in regards to which data structures are considered to be best. ‘Best’, in this context, usually relates to the time complexity of the structure, or how long it will take the interpreter to either manipulate or locate the individual pieces of data within the storage. Since computers can only run a finite amount of actions, within a set amount of time, efficiency is the ‘name-of-the-game’ when writing code. Efficiency can come in many forms, but in terms of data structures, there are three main concerns when considering…