Programming languages do one very simple thing: they allow you to write programs that tell the computer what to do. You can tell a computer to read a value from the keyboard, add two numbers, save a result in a file on the hard disk, or draw a smiley face on the screen. No matter what programming language you use, the underlying commands that the computer can execute are exactly the same. Wheth…
IT HAS BEEN SAID THAT SIR ISAAC NEWTON was the last person to know everything. He was an accomplished physicist (his three laws of motion were the basis of classical mechanics, which defi ned astrophysics for three centuries), mathematician (he was one of the inventors of calculus and developed Newton’s Method for fi nding roots of equations), astronomer, natural philosopher, and alchemist (o…