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  • In the early days of computing,

  • programmers needed to be very sure about the data they were operating on.

  • If an operation was fed a number when it was expecting a letter, a character:

  • at best you might get a garbled response,

  • and at worst you could break the system. Maybe even physically.

  • Now, at the low level of coding, yeah, that's still true.

  • But these days we have programming languages where

  • we don't always need to be so rigorous in defining the data,

  • and we can let the computer figure it out.

  • But for something that seems so technical, this can be controversial.

  • When you write a computer program, you use variables,

  • which are basically just labelled buckets of memory.

  • Inside that bucket is some data, and you can change it,

  • you can vary it. Hence, variable.

  • I know it's a massive simplification,

  • but computer memory is a bit like an enormous rack of switches

  • storing ones and zeros that represent other things like letters and numbers.

  • But if we look into a region of memory,

  • there is nothing in there to indicate what those ones and zeros are actually representing.

  • So in the code, we declare that the variable is a particular type.

  • What's contained in that variable, in that bucket? It's an integer.

  • What's in that one? It's a string of characters.

  • That tells the computer how to interpret those ones and zeros in memory.

  • The types that you get to use can differ a bit between languages.

  • But in general, you'll at least have: Integer or INT.

  • That's a whole number that can't have anything after the decimal point.

  • And those are extremely useful for storing things like

  • the number of times you've looped through some code,

  • or how many points your player's clocked up,

  • or how many pennies there are in someone's account.

  • Then you've got character or CHAR.

  • These are letters, numbers, punctuation, and whitespaces,

  • like the space between words, and instructions to start a new line.

  • And in most high-level languages, you'll probably be using a STRING instead,

  • which is just a string of characters.

  • Then you've got Boolean, or BOOL, named after George Boole, an English mathematician.

  • That's very simple: it's true or false.

  • A boolean only contains either a zero or a one. A yes or a no.

  • A no or a yes.

  • Nothing more.

  • Then there's floating-point numbers, or FLOATs.

  • Floats are complicated and messy and a whole other video, but in short,

  • they let you store numbers with decimals,

  • although you might lose a very small bit of precision as you do it.

  • There are others, other types, in a lot of languages,

  • I know it's more complicated than this: but this is just the basics.

  • So. Most languages useexplicit type declaration”.

  • So when you declare a when you set up that bucket,

  • you have to also declare its type.

  • So, x is an integer, it can only hold integers, and right now, that integer is 2.

  • But in some languages,

  • including some popular ones that people tend to get started with, and that I like,

  • you don't need to actually declare that.

  • It just gets figured out from your code. That's calledimplicit declaration”.

  • So in JavaScript, you can just type x = 1.5 and it'll know, that's a number.

  • Put the 1.5 in quotes, and it'll go, ah, it's a string.

  • So, okay, it's storing 1.5 and “1.5” as different ones and zeros.

  • Why does that matter?

  • Well, in JavaScript, the plus sign means two different things.

  • It's the addition operator, for adding two numbers together.

  • But it's also the concatenation operator, for combining two strings together.

  • So if x is “1.5”, you ask for x + x... it returns 3.

  • But if either of those xs is "1.5", a string,

  • it'll return that.

  • And that's calledtype casting”; converting from one data type to another.

  • Some languages require the programmer to explicitly request the conversion in code.

  • Other languages, like JavaScript there, do it automatically.

  • JavaScript is referred to as havingweak typingas opposed tostrong typing”.

  • And it's weak because, even if that 1.5 is a string,

  • and you ask for it multiplied by 2…

  • it'll return 3.

  • Unlike the plus sign, that asterisk can only mean 'multiply',

  • so it can only handle an integer or a floating-point number.

  • Give it a string, though,

  • and it won't throw an error like a strongly-typed language would.

  • It'll just convert it for you on the fly.

  • Really convenient. Really easy to program with.

  • Really easy to accidentally screw things up

  • and create a bug that'll take you hours to track down.

  • Or worse, create a bug that you don't even notice until much, much later.

  • In a lot of languages, you can also cast to and from boolean values.

  • Which is called "truthiness",

  • and experienced programmers who are watching this may already be grimacing.

  • Truthiness is a great shorthand.

  • If you convert an empty string to a boolean,

  • it generally comes out as false.

  • Anything else, true.

  • So you can just test for an empty string with if(x).

  • But that also means that in JavaScript,

  • you can ask for true + true and it'll tell you that the answer to that is 2,

  • because when you cast 'true' to a number you get 1.

  • In PHP, a language notable for many questionable design decisions,

  • even a string with just a single zero in it will get converted to a boolean false,

  • there's a special case just for that string.

  • Which can cause a lot of unexpected bugs.

  • Now, there is a workaround for that in loosely-typed languages.

  • Normally, if you want to compare two variables,

  • you use two equals signs, like this.

  • You can't use a single one, because that's used for assigning variables.

  • I've been coding for about thirty years and I still absent-mindedly screw that up sometimes.

  • Now, if you ask if 1.5 is equal to “1.5” with two equals signs in JavaScript or PHP,

  • you'll gettrue”.

  • But if you add a third equals sign, then you're asking for strict equality.

  • If the data types don't match, any comparison will automatically fail.

  • So why is all this controversial?

  • Well, languages like Javascript and PHP can get a bad reputation

  • because they use weak typing.

  • If you see yourself as a Real Programmer -- and I'm using that sarcastically,

  • but if you see yourself as the kind of programmer where you are in control of everything, then

  • yeah, you can see that weak typing is like training wheels,

  • something that introduces sloppy coding practices and bugs and shorthand.

  • And that's not unfair.

  • But weak typing also makes programming easier to learn and easier to do,

  • it can reduce frustration and just make programmers' lives easier.

  • It is a trade-off:

  • even if it is a controversial one.

  • This series of The Basics is sponsored by Dashlane, the password manager.

  • It's kinda obvious that passwords are more secure the longer they are,

  • but it can be difficult to get an intuitive sense of just how much more secure.

  • So let's say you've signed up to Dashlane,

  • and now you're able to use long, complicated, symbol-filled passwords everywhere

  • because Dashlane remembers, synchronises and autofills them for you.

  • How much more secure are those passwords?

  • Well, let's do the maths.

  • The characters that most web sites tend to accept for passwords are:

  • uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and let's say thirty punctuation marks.

  • That's 92 characters.

  • There's an argument that you should be allowed to use any Unicode character in a password,

  • but it's definitely an argument,

  • so let's limit it to those 92 characters.

  • First, because we're using random characters, we can ignore 'wordlists'

  • that make password cracking orders of magnitude easier by guessing dictionary words first

  • including, like, using an exclamation mark instead of a 1,

  • or deliberately swapping a couple of letters.

  • Those tricks won't work here.

  • Now, let's say that an attacker is able to test

  • a billion possible passwords every single second.

  • That's not unreasonable if the encryption is weak and their computer is fast.

  • If you have a six-character password,

  • it will take them at about ten minutes to try

  • every single possible one of the 606 billion combinations.

  • But every letter you add multiples that time by 92.

  • Seven characters works out to 15 and a half hours.

  • Eight characters, about two months.

  • Nine characters, 14 years.

  • Ten characters, more than a millennium.

  • Eleven characters is a hundred thousand years.

  • By the time you've got to fifteen characters,

  • it's about a thousand times longer than the universe has existed.

  • Long, complicated, random passwords aren't a cure-all.

  • But they're certainly better than the alternative.

  • And to help you with them:

  • dashlane.com/tomscott for a 30-day free trial of Dashlane Premium,

  • which includes unlimited password storage and sync,

  • plus a load of other features.

  • And if you like it, you can use the codetomscottfor 10% off.

In the early days of computing,

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