Algorithms

If you are majoring in any of computer science, information technology, linguism, mathematics or information systems you have probably had once or twice of the fancy term ALGORITHMS.

figure below illustrates an algorithm which manipulates a digital image.
image Adapted from ncku

 

In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm is a step-by-step procedure for calculations. Algorithms are used for calculation, data processing, and automated reasoning.
An algorithm is an effective method expressed as a finite list^[1] of well-defined instructions for calculating a function. Starting from an initial state and initial input (perhaps empty), the instructions describe a computation that, when executed, proceeds through a finite number of well-defined successive states, eventually producing "output"and terminating at a final ending state. The transition from one state to the next is not necessarily deterministic; some algorithms, known as randomized algorithms, incorporate random input.
Though al-Khwārizmī's algorism referred to the rules of performing arithmetic using Hindu–Arabic numerals and the systematic solution of linear and quadratic equations, a partial formalization of what would become the modern algorithm began with attempts to solve the Entscheidungsproblem (the "decision problem") posed by David Hilbert in 1928. Subsequent formalizations were framed as attempts to define "effective calculability" or "effective method"; those formalizations included the Gödel–Herbrand–Kleene recursive functions of 1930, 1934 and 1935, Alonzo Church's lambda calculus of 1936, Emil Post's "Formulation 1" of 1936, and Alan Turing's Turing machines of 1936–7 and 1939. Giving a formal definition of algorithms, corresponding to the intuitive notion, remains a challenging problem.

Dear Blog Viewers

So I have decided not to include any code on this blog (code.org), only theory based content will be available also code will be available but on a different blog, whici I will let the URL be available soon.

I apologize for any inconviniences.  

A Dive Into WEB Development / Programming

Thought we won't spend much time on web programming , it is still a very essential aspect of programming especially on the internet and web.

Web development/ Programming is a broad term for the work involved in developing a web site for the Internet (World Wide Web) or an intranet (a private network). Web development can range from developing the simplest static single page of plain text to the most complex web-based internet applications, electronic businesses, and social network services. A more comprehensive list of tasks to which web development commonly refers, may include web design, web content development, client liaison, client-side/server-side scripting, web server and network security configuration, and e-commerce development. Among web professionals, "web development" usually refers to the main non-design aspects of building web sites: writing markup and coding.
For larger organizations and businesses, web development teams can consist of hundreds of people (web developers). Smaller organizations may only require a single permanent or contracting webmaster, or secondary assignment to related job positions such as a graphic designer and/or information systems technician. Web development may be a collaborative effort between departments rather than the domain of a designated department.

Since the commercialization of the web, web development has been a growing industry. The growth of this industry is being pushed especially by businesses wishing to sell products and services to online customers.
For tools and platforms, the public can use many open source systems to aid in web development. A popular example, the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack is available for download online free of charge. This has kept the cost of learning web development to a minimum. Another contributing factor to the growth of the industry has been the rise of easy-to-use WYSIWYG web-development software, most prominently Adobe Dreamweaver, WebDev, and Microsoft Expression Studio. Using such software, virtually anyone can relatively quickly learn to develop a very basic web page. Knowledge of HyperText Markup Language (HTML) or of programming languages is still required to use such software, but the basics can be learned and implemented quickly with the help of help files, technical books, internet tutorials, or face-to-face training.
An ever growing set of tools and technologies have helped developers build more dynamic and interactive websites. Web developers now help to deliver applications as web services which were traditionally only available as applications on a desk-based computer.
Instead of running executable code on a local computer, users can interact with online applications to create new content. This has created new methods in communication and allowed for many opportunities to decentralize information and media distribution. Users can interact with applications from many locations, instead of being tied to a specific workstation for their application environment.
Examples of dramatic transformation in communication and commerce led by web development include e-commerce. Online auction-sites such as eBay have changed the way consumers find and purchase goods and services. Online retailers such as Amazon.com and Buy.com (among many others) have transformed the shopping and bargain-hunting experience for many consumers. Another good example of transformative communication led by web development is the blog. Web applications such as WordPress and Movable Type have created easily-implemented blog-environments for individual web sites. The popularity of open-source content management systems such as Joomla!, Drupal, XOOPS, and TYPO3 and enterprise content management systems such as Alfresco and eXo Platform have extended web development's impact at online interaction and communication.
Web development has also impacted personal networking and marketing. Websites are no longer simply tools for work or for commerce, but serve more broadly for communication and social networking. Websites such as Facebook and Twitter provide users with a platform to communicate and organizations with a more personal and interactive way to engage the public.

Web Development can be split into many areas and a typical and basic web development hierarchy might consist of:

• Ajax Asynchronous JavaScript provides new methods of using JavaScript, and other languages to improve the user experience.
• Flash Adobe Flash Player is a ubiquitous browser plugin ready for RIAs. Flex 2 is also deployed to the Flash Player (version 9+).
• JavaScript JavaScript is a ubiquitous client side platform for creating and delivering rich web applications that can also run across a wide variety of devices. It is a dialect of the scripting language ECMAScript.
• jQuery Cross-browser JavaScript library designed to simplify and speed up the client-side scripting of HTML.
• Microsoft Silverlight Microsoft's browser plugin that enables animation, vector graphics and high-definition video playback, programmed using XAML and .NET programming languages.
• HTML5 and CSS3 Latest HTML proposed standard combined with the latest proposed standard for CSS natively supports much of the client-side functionality provided by other frameworks such as Flash and Silverlight

Looking at these items from an "umbrella approach", client side coding such as XHTML is executed and stored on a local client (in a web browser) whereas server side code is not available to a client and is executed on a web server which generates the appropriate XHTML which is then sent to the client. The nature of client side coding allows one to alter the HTML on a local client and refresh the pages with updated content (locally), web designers must bear in mind the importance and relevance to security with their server side scripts. If a server side script accepts content from a locally modified client side script, the web development of that page is poorly sanitized with relation to security.

The One And Only Ruby

 

Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, object-oriented, general-purpose programming language. It was designed and developed in the mid-1990s by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto in Japan.

According to its authors, Ruby was influenced by Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp. It supports multiple programming paradigms, including functional, object-oriented, and imperative. It also has a dynamic type system and automatic memory management.

The first public release of Ruby 0.95 was announced on Japanese domestic newsgroups on December 21, 1995.Subsequently three more versions of Ruby were released in two days. The release coincided with the launch of the Japanese-language ruby-list mailing list, which was the first mailing list for the new language.
Already present at this stage of development were many of the features familiar in later releases of Ruby, including object-oriented design, classes with inheritance, mixins, iterators, closures, exception handling and garbage collection.

Matsumoto has said that Ruby is designed for programmer productivity and fun, following the principles of good user interface design.At a Google Tech Talk in 2008 Matsumoto further stated, "I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy. That is the primary purpose of Ruby language." He stresses that systems design needs to emphasize human, rather than computer, needs:Often people, especially computer engineers, focus on the machines. They think, "By doing this, the machine will run faster. By doing this, the machine will run more effectively. By doing this, the machine will something something something." They are focusing on machines. But in fact we need to focus on humans, on how humans care about doing programming or operating the application of the machines. We are the masters. They are the slaves.
Ruby is said to follow the principle of least astonishment (POLA), meaning that the language should behave in such a way as to minimize confusion for experienced users. Matsumoto has said his primary design goal was to make a language which he himself enjoyed using, by minimizing programmer work and possible confusion. He has said that he had not applied the principle of least surprise to the design of Ruby,but nevertheless the phrase has come to be closely associated with the Ruby programming language. The phrase has itself been a source of surprise, as novice users may take it to mean that Ruby's behaviors try to closely match behaviors familiar from other languages. In a May 2005 discussion on the newsgroup comp.lang.ruby, Matsumoto attempted to distance Ruby from POLA, explaining that because any design choice will be surprising to someone, he uses a personal standard in evaluating surprise. If that personal standard remains consistent, there would be few surprises for those familiar with the standard.
Matsumoto defined it this way in an interview:Everyone has an individual background. Someone may come from Python, someone else may come from Perl, and they may be surprised by different aspects of the language. Then they come up to me and say, 'I was surprised by this feature of the language, so Ruby violates the principle of least surprise.' Wait. Wait. The principle of least surprise is not for you only. The principle of least surprise means principle of least my surprise. And it means the principle of least surprise after you learn Ruby very well. For example, I was a C++ programmer before I started designing Ruby. I programmed in C++ exclusively for two or three years. And after two years of C++ programming, it still surprises me.


Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto Creator and Designer of The Ruby Programming Language

 

Let's Talk A Bit Objective-C

Objective-C Derived from C, though it primarily written for IOS(MAC/ Apple) , it can also run on windows. I would not personally recommend it for beginners you should dive into it if you have atleast prorammed in at least one or more languages.Either ways it is a fun and not very hard language to learn.

Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. It is the main programming language used by Apple for the OS X and iOS operating systems, and their respective application programming interfaces (APIs), Cocoa and Cocoa Touch.
The programming language Objective-C was originally developed in the early 1980s. It was selected as the main language used by NeXT for its NeXTSTEP operating system, from which OS X and iOS are derived.^[2] Generic Objective-C programs that do not use the Cocoa or Cocoa Touch libraries, or using parts that may be ported or reimplemented for other systems can also be compiled for any system supported by GCC or Clang.
Objective-C source code program files usually have .m filename extensions, while Objective-C header files have .h extensions, the same as for C header files. Objective-C++ files are denoted with a .mm file extension.

Objective-C was created primarily by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s at their company Stepstone.^[3] Both had been introduced to Smalltalk while at ITT Corporation's Programming Technology Center in 1981. The earliest work on Objective-C traces back to around that time.^[4] Cox was intrigued by problems of true reusability in software design and programming. He realized that a language like Smalltalk would be invaluable in building development environments for system developers at ITT. However, he and Tom Love also recognized that backward compatibility with C was critically important in ITT's telecom engineering milieu.^[5]
Cox began writing a pre-processor for C to add some of the capabilities of Smalltalk. He soon had a working implementation of an object-oriented extension to the C language, which he called "OOPC" for Object-Oriented Pre-Compiler.^[6] Love was hired by Schlumberger Research in 1982 and had the opportunity to acquire the first commercial copy of Smalltalk-80, which further influenced the development of their brainchild.
In order to demonstrate that real progress could be made, Cox showed that making interchangeable software components really needed only a few practical changes to existing tools. Specifically, they needed to support objects in a flexible manner, come supplied with a usable set of libraries, and allow for the code (and any resources needed by the code) to be bundled into a single cross-platform format.
Love and Cox eventually formed a new venture, Productivity Products International (PPI), to commercialize their product, which coupled an Objective-C compiler with class libraries. In 1986, Cox published the main description of Objective-C in its original form in the book Object-Oriented Programming, An Evolutionary Approach. Although he was careful to point out that there is more to the problem of reusability than just the language, Objective-C often found itself compared feature for feature with other languages.

The language PERL

One of the very easy to learn languages, it would take atleast 3 weeks of effective work to be fluent in Perl, it is smooth and fun to learn too.


Perl is a family of high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. The languages in this family include Perl 5 and Perl 6.
Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, such as: Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions. The latest major stable revision of Perl 5 is 5.20, released in May 2014. Perl 6, which began as a redesign of Perl 5 in 2000, eventually evolved into a separate language. Both languages continue to be developed independently by different development teams and liberally borrow ideas from one another.
The Perl languages borrow features from other programming languages including C, shell scripting (sh), AWK, and sed.They provide powerful text processing facilities without the arbitrary data-length limits of many contemporary Unix commandline tools, facilitating easy manipulation of text files. Perl 5 gained widespread popularity in the late 1990s as a CGI scripting language, in part due to its parsing abilities.
In addition to CGI, Perl 5 is used for graphics programming, system administration, network programming, finance, bioinformatics, and other applications. It is nicknamed "the Swiss Army chainsaw of scripting languages" because of its flexibility and power, and possibly also because of its "ugliness". In 1998, it was also referred to as the "duct tape that holds the Internet together", in reference to both its ubiquitous use as a glue language and its inelegance

 

My Personal Favorite "JAVA"

I myself wrote my first program in Java not only is it high level which makes it very easy for novice programmers to understand and grasp the syntax Java is also one of the few most widely used programming languages  of all time, not to mention it is very secure and reliable. concurrent, class-based, object-oriented, and specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is intended to let application developers "write once, run anywhere" (WORA), meaning that code that runs on one platform does not need to be recompiled to run on another. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode (class file) that can run on any Java virtual machine (JVM) regardless of computer architecture. Java is, as of 2014, one of the most popular programming languages in use, particularly for client-server web applications, with a reported 9 million developers.^[10][11] Java was originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems (which has since merged into Oracle Corporation) and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++, but it has fewer low-level facilities than either of them.

The original and reference implementation Java compilers, virtual machines, and class libraries were developed by Sun from 1991 and first released in 1995. As of May 2007, in compliance with the specifications of the Java Community Process, Sun relicensed most of its Java technologies under the GNU General Public License. Others have also developed alternative implementations of these Sun technologies, such as the GNU Compiler for Java (bytecode compiler), GNU Classpath (standard libraries), and IcedTea-Web (browser plugin for applets).

The language was created and developed by James Gosling, also known as Father of JAVA.

 

The C Programming Language

Initially developed by Dennis Ritchie between 1969 and 1973 at AT&T Bell Labs. Like most imperative languages in the ALGOL tradition, C has facilities for structured programming and allows lexical variable scope and recursion, while a static type system prevents many unintended operations. Its design provides constructs that map efficiently to typical machine instructions, and therefore it has found lasting use in applications that had formerly been coded in assembly language, most notably system software like the Unix computer operating system.

C is one of the most widely used programming languages of all time, and C compilers are available for the majority of available computer architectures and operating systems.
Many later languages have borrowed directly or indirectly from C, including D, Go, Rust, Java, JavaScript, Limbo, LPC, C#, Objective-C, Perl, PHP, Python, Verilog (hardware description language), and Unix's C shell. These languages have drawn many of their control structures and other basic features from C. Most of them (with Python being the most dramatic exception) are also very syntactically similar to C in general, and they tend to combine the recognizable expression and statement syntax of C with underlying type systems, data models, and semantics that can be radically different. C++ and Objective-C started as compilers that generated C code; C++ is currently nearly a superset of C, while Objective-C is a strict superset of C.
Before there was an official standard for C, many users and implementors relied on an informal specification contained in a book by Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan; that version is generally referred to as "K&R" C. In 1989 the American National Standards Institute published a standard for C (generally called "ANSI C" or "C89"). The next year, the same specification was approved by the International Organization for Standardization as an international standard (generally called "C90"). ISO later released an extension to the internationalization support of the standard in 1995, and a revised standard (known as "C99") in 1999. The current version of the standard (now known as "C11") was approved in December 2011.

A Dive on Python.

First of will start with Python one of my favorite and is recommended widely for beginners Python is also used for introductory Computer Science/Computer Engineering and Information Systems/Technology in many universities including Harvard,Stanford, MIT , and in other schools. PYTHON(aka "PY") is a widely used general-purpose, high-level programming language.^[16][17][18] Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability, and its syntax allows programmers to express concepts in fewer lines of code than would be possible in languages such as C.^[19][20] The language provides constructs intended to enable clear programs on both a small and large scale.^[21]
Python supports multiple programming paradigms, including object-oriented, imperative and functional programming or procedural styles. It features a dynamic type system and automatic memory management and has a large and comprehensive standard library.^[22]
Like other dynamic languages, Python is often used as a scripting language, but is also used in a wide range of non-scripting contexts. Using third-party tools, such as Py2exe or Pyinstaller,^[23] Python code can be packaged into standalone executable programs. Python interpreters are available for many operating systems.
CPython, the reference implementation of Python, is free and open source software and has a community-based development model, as do nearly all of its alternative implementations. CPython is managed by the non-profit Python Software Foundation.

The language was created and developed by Guido van Rossum.

I assure you it is very diverse and once you understand the syntax and logic , it would be very easy to learn another language especially Java, C#, Ruby,C++ and also Perl.