The Dojo

The dojo is a place of learning and discussing the theoretical aspects of programming, without focusing on one specific language. We shall use conventions where needed. There will be times when I will enumerate or single out programming languages as examples, but the main focus is to learn the theoretical fundamentals first.

The Dojo aims to be a good place to start learning about programming from scratch. We are on this journey together, so if there’s any place along the path where anyone gets stuck, he should tell the others and we shall see how to improve the path for others traveling with us as well.

I promise that at the end of this journey, it will be very easy to start learning a new programming language with all the knowledge that you have acquired.

The Path

The History: Finding a 1 The first part of our journey takes us from around 60000 years ago where we find evidence of “proto-coding” and “proto-art” up to around 5000 years ago where we find the first clear documentation of numbers. We also found a 1, but not a 0.

The History: Finding a 0 Zero has proven to be very elusive to mathematicians and astronomers of ancient times. Archimedes succeeded in estimating the number of grains of sand in the Universe to a surprisingly accurate degree without having an understanding of zero. Many other discoveries have been made without this knowledge. It took another 5000 years from the discovery of numbers to the discovery of 0.

Bits: Numbers Stored as Bits Our journey continues with ways in which bits can represent decimal numbers (the numbers we all use in day to day life), and what special properties these representations hold.

Bits: Beyond Numbers Straying away temporarily from the history experiment, we focus here on what a single bit can represent. We also begin to explore how multiple bits may be combined into groups of multiple bits to achieve more.