This week I am going to something different for Widget Wednesdays. I am going to describe my favorite “simplest computer program”.<\/p>\n
When somebody tells me that they could never learn how to program, this is the program that I scribble down on a napkin for them. Some of you might be familiar with this — it’s quite beautiful.<\/p>\n
Most of us learned about the Fibonacci sequence when we were kids. It describes so many things in nature, from the shape of flower petals to how populations grow.<\/p>\n
The principle is very simple. Starting with the numbers 0 and 1, you just keep adding the last two numbers to get the next one:<\/p>\n
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, …<\/font><\/p>\n Nicely enough, a program to compute the nth number in the series looks like this:<\/p>\n fibonacci(n) is No matter how math-phobic you think you are, that is a very easy computer program to understand. And it contains many of the core ideas in computer programming — functions, variables, conditionals, arithmetic, and even recursion.<\/p>\n Which makes me hopeful for the whole process of teaching programming. As an ancient Chinese proverb never said: “A program of a thousand lines begins with a single step.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This week I am going to something different for Widget Wednesdays. I am going to describe my favorite “simplest computer program”. When somebody tells me that they could never learn how to program, this is the program that I scribble down on a napkin for them. Some of you might be familiar with this — … Continue reading “Widget Wednesdays #19”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24345"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24345"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24354,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24345\/revisions\/24354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/font> if n < 2
\n then n
\n else
\n fibonacci(n-2) + fibonacci(n-1)<\/font><\/p>\n