What is programming anyway?

Programming is problem solving, creativity and gateway to computational thinking. In essence programmers bring a computer to life. A computer really understands a few commands. And those commands need to be given in the language that the computer understands, which is simply a series of ones and zeroes, or binary numbers. But very few people who learn to decipher the ones and zeroes that a given computer sees at the lowest level. These machine instructions tell the computer to do one of those very few commands that it knows how to do. These are very simple commands like performing basic arithmetic, comparing two numbers, or loading a value from memory, or storing it to memory.

Machine code

The set of commands can be different depending on the family of processor running the code. Each command will translate to a binary sequence. Data can also be converted into binary. And the combination of these two forms the machine code.

Surely, this is not the way people naturally think or communicate. So, to overcome these difficulties people have developed higher level programming languages, meaning, commands expressed to a computer in a way that people can more easily comprehend.

From very early on these higher level programming languages such as Fortran in 1957, and COBOL in 1959 were developed to let people write code that was independent of any specific computer.

Over time, as people had new ideas for ways their thinking and how they’d like to express that in code, more programming languages were developed. So along the way we have BASIC, Pascal, C, C++, Python, Java and so on. Each of these languages were developed for people to be able to understand write instructions to the computer. Programming languages are developed for people, not for computers. When people writes program it is as important that people understand the code as it is the computer understands it. For programmers it is like taking our ideas and expressing them in a logical ordered way. Programming languages helps us structures our ideas and instructions for the computer in ways that we can understand. Then, there is a separate program called the compiler or an interpreter, that will convert the program into a series of ones and zeroes that the computer will understand.