Skip to main content

Introduction

This course is aimed towards people with none to little prior coding experience. It covers the foundations of programming by focusing on problem setting and problem solving. JavaScript is the chosen language: the standard language for the frontend (the code that runs in a web browser), a solid choice for backend (the code that runs in a server).

Most of the topic are language agnostic though, and valid across various different choices, syntax and grammar apart of course.

Even if becoming a professional developer is not on your checklist, don't turn around! You will still benefit a lot by getting a sense of computability - read: what machines can and cannot do - especially in a world where machines and networks systems are playing an always more prominent role.

What is code? (Baby don't hurt me)​

That's a good question! In a computer environment, code is a set of instructions that can be interpreted and executed by a machine, leading to print some output on screen or to generate some other consequence (writing something to the machine's disk, sending or retrieving some information over the network or interacting with the operating system).

In this course we'll focus mainly on the first. It may sound uninteresting at first, but think for a moment: everything you see online is some printed output! Ok there are images and videos, too many for my taste if you ask. But every webpage is a list of words and symbols under the hood.

What do we mean by producing an output? Let's consider the following example:

function getTallestEntry(list) {
    let tallest = list[0];
    for (let entry of list) {
        if (entry.height > tallest.height) {
            tallest = entry;
        }
    }
    return tallest;
}

const ducklings = [
    { name: "Huey", height: 50 },
    { name: "Dewey", height: 60 },
    { name: "Louie", height: 40 },
];

console.log(getTallestEntry(ducklings));
Toggle Console Output

Heyhey, what's this mess of symbols and colors? You are right, I threw you into the cold water. But focus for one second on the list that goes from line 11 to 15 (const ducklings = [...]), then on the results below. Never mind all the commas and curly braces and just consider the following three points:

  • we have a list with some information - name and supposed height of some amusing fictional characters
  • below we have the output of some operation
  • the output matches our expectation that Dewey is the tallest of the three, given the information in the list.

Now you could have found the same result by just looking at the list yourself. For such a small set I would have done the same too! But check the following:

function getTallestEntry(list) {
    let tallest = list[0];
    for (let entry of list) {
        if (entry.height > tallest.height) {
            tallest = entry;
        }
    }
    return tallest;
}

const people = [
    { name: "Mr. A", height: 168 },
    { name: "Mrs. B", height: 171 },
    { name: "Mr. C", height: 158 },
    { name: "Mrs. D", height: 188 },
    { name: "Mr. E", height: 162 },
    { name: "Mrs. F", height: 193 },
    { name: "Mr. G", height: 158 },
    { name: "Mrs. H", height: 160 },
    { name: "Mr. I", height: 176 },
    { name: "Mrs. J", height: 187 },
    { name: "Mr. K", height: 189 },
    { name: "Mrs. L", height: 190 },
];

console.log(getTallestEntry(people));
Toggle Console Output

I bet you had to scan the whole list before finding out Mrs. F! Observe how the first four lines of the program are left untouched. Even if we don't understand what's going on yet, we have the intuition that the program has a flexible strategy to digest a list of various possible lengths. Now imagine having a list of thousands of entries and doing such search manually...let me know when you have chosen your new pair of glasses, I'll entertain myself with the gentle output of the program if you don't mind.

Input / operations / output. Avocado, onion, tomato... / chopping and mixing / guacamole. For each process we'll learn to determine the desired input and output and the instructions that will lead from the former to the latter. We'll also learn how to split broader operations in ones that are smallest and easier to understand.