Three steps to bring guarded statements to JavaScript for safer, better code, and forgo common usage of “else” statements. — Edsger W. Dijkstra, a Turing Award winner and ACM Fellow, the inventor of the “structured programming” phrase, and one of the first drivers of Computer Programming becoming a scientific discipline, made many contributions to the theory of programming. In this article we’ll be going back to a very old idea…

Revisiting the Babylonian method for square roots: why and how does it work? In my A totally new, very old method for finding square roots article, I described how I discovered an algorithm that actually happened to be very old and well-known: the “Babylonian method.” (See References, at the bottom…

A new iterative method to approximate square roots — actually shown to be centuries old! Isaac Asimov once wrote [1] that all his discoveries in Math were either “completely correct findings that are quite old [or] completely new findings that are quite wrong.” I just had exactly the same experience…

Safely evaluate expressions in JavaScript in a simple yet powerful way, by using a Parsing Expression Grammar Recently, in a front-end project I was working on, the client needed to be able to define calculations by entering formulas using numbers, variables, and functions. …

How to win Globant's contest with algorithms! — For the Under-20 World 2023 Cup in Argentina, Globant created a contest with a puzzle of mine, "The Rare Card", the solution of which would allow a winner to travel to the final match in the tournament.

“Partial Application” may sound like a complex thing, but it is actually quite a powerful tool that will simplify the way you work, and this article will show you how to easily implement it for your JavaScript code. When we discussed higher-order functions such as decorators, we saw several ways…

Recursion is a powerful tool for algorithm design, and this article will show several examples of its application to produce some math calculations. How can you calculate powers? In JavaScript, that’s easy: if you want to calculate 2^3 (also written as 2³) you can either use Math.pow(2,3) or in a…

In previous articles, we discussed what a higher-order function (HOF) was and how we could use them to extend the functionality of our code, both for JavaScript and for TypeScript programming. As a summary, a HOF is a function that takes functions as arguments, and possibly returns a function as…

How do you solve Kakuro or Killer Sudoku puzzles? Or create Magic Squares? Or possibly solve Cryptarithmetic puzzles? We can do all that with JavaScript, some recursive techniques, and some extra code, as we’ll see below. Some basic concepts All the puzzles we’ll be considering have to do with distinct numbers. Suppose we…