One of the questions asked by a Tech Tuesday reader was about using multiple different programming languages for different parts of a site. Back in the early days of the web that wasn’t really an issue because you would write the page generation in something like Perl or TCL and that was all there was. Well, not really because even then you had to know HTML but of course early HTML was so minimal that it didn’t really matter much. Well along came more HTML, CSS and most importantly Javascript...

One of the questions asked by a Tech Tuesday reader was about using multiple different programming languages for different parts of a site. Back in the early days of the web that wasn’t really an issue because you would write the page generation in something like Perl or TCL and that was all there was. Well, not really because even then you had to know HTML but of course early HTML was so minimal that it didn’t really matter much. Well along came more HTML, CSS and most importantly Javascript...

This is the first post in the Tech Tuesday cycle on programming. Let’s begin with a simple observation: even though various human languages are quite different from each other they cover much of the same territory – the human experience. We have words for food and activities and threats and so on. There are different words in different languages and sometimes even the symbol set is entirely different (I am struggling to remember Mandarin for our upcoming China trip). But despite those differe...

This is the first post in the Tech Tuesday cycle on programming. Let’s begin with a simple observation: even though various human languages are quite different from each other they cover much of the same territory – the human experience. We have words for food and activities and threats and so on. There are different words in different languages and sometimes even the symbol set is entirely different (I am struggling to remember Mandarin for our upcoming China trip). But despite those differe...

In the last two Tech Tuesdays, I introduced Finite State Machines (FSM) and showed examples of both their usefulness and their limitation. Just as a reminder, we study computer science theory to get a handle on two fundamental questions: what can be computed at all (computability)? And, how hard is it to compute something that can be computed (complexity)? The upshot on FSM is that they cannot compute a whole lot but what they can they do very efficiently. Let me flush both parts of that asse...

In the last two Tech Tuesdays, I introduced Finite State Machines (FSM) and showed examples of both their usefulness and their limitation. Just as a reminder, we study computer science theory to get a handle on two fundamental questions: what can be computed at all (computability)? And, how hard is it to compute something that can be computed (complexity)? The upshot on FSM is that they cannot compute a whole lot but what they can they do very efficiently. Let me flush both parts of that asse...