The term “referential transparency” comes from analytical philosophy, the branch of philosophy that analyzes natural language constructs, statements and arguments based on the methods of logic and mathematics. In other words, it is the closest subject outside computer science to what we call programming language semantics. The philosopher Willard Quine was responsible for initiating the … Read more
This question isn’t as silly as it might seem to some. At least theoretically, something such as O(1/n) is completely sensible when we take the mathematical definition of the Big O notation: Now you can easily substitute g(x) for 1/x … it’s obvious that the above definition still holds for some f. For the purpose … Read more
I’m in charge of some applications that manage many TB of images. We’ve found that storing file paths in the database to be best. There are a couple of issues: database storage is usually more expensive than file system storage you can super-accelerate file system access with standard off the shelf products for example, many … Read more
A Y-combinator is a “functional” (a function that operates on other functions) that enables recursion, when you can’t refer to the function from within itself. In computer-science theory, it generalizes recursion, abstracting its implementation, and thereby separating it from the actual work of the function in question. The benefit of not needing a compile-time name … Read more
Usually, I replace a recursive algorithm by an iterative algorithm by pushing the parameters that would normally be passed to the recursive function onto a stack. In fact, you are replacing the program stack by one of your own. var stack = []; stack.push(firstObject); // while not empty while (stack.length) { // Pop off end … Read more
What is NP? NP is the set of all decision problems (questions with a yes-or-no answer) for which the ‘yes’-answers can be verified in polynomial time (O(nk) where n is the problem size, and k is a constant) by a deterministic Turing machine. Polynomial time is sometimes used as the definition of fast or quickly. … Read more
Cohesion refers to what the class (or module) can do. Low cohesion would mean that the class does a great variety of actions – it is broad, unfocused on what it should do. High cohesion means that the class is focused on what it should be doing, i.e. only methods relating to the intention of … Read more
Here’s the briefest explanation: A Turing Complete system means a system in which a program can be written that will find an answer (although with no guarantees regarding runtime or memory). So, if somebody says “my new thing is Turing Complete” that means in principle (although often not in practice) it could be used to … Read more
Lambda comes from the Lambda Calculus and refers to anonymous functions in programming. Why is this cool? It allows you to write quick throw away functions without naming them. It also provides a nice way to write closures. With that power you can do things like this. Python def adder(x): return lambda y: x + … Read more