Where can you see programs in use?Įverywhere! From your operating system on your computer through complex websites, all are written using code! Older (and newer!) cell phones, fancy coffee machines, self-driving cars, Facebook, Amazon, an ATM, the Lyft App, metro card reloaders, supermarket scanners, and most TVs use code to run in addition to your desktop or laptop computer. Programming, at its core, is taking a big problem and breaking it into smaller and smaller problems until they are small enough that we can tell the computer to solve that problem. Computers are very literal - they will take our instructions and follow them exactly, but we must lay them out in a very detailed way so that they understand us. When we write programs, we are writing instructions that the computer will follow. When someone writes a program, that person is giving the computer a set of commands that it must follow. Programming is telling the computer how to ingest, process, and then store that data. A computer is a machine that processes and stores information. You probably interact with computers on a daily basis, but let's define concretely what we mean when we talk about computers in relation to programming. We'll use Python in this post, but a lot of the building blocks work across programming languages, so this will still help even if you are interested in learning a different language at first. This post is going to start out by discussing what computers are at a conceptual level, and then discuss the programming fundamentals. What even is programming? And, what are the building blocks of programming?
This post may seem out of place on a site for programmers, but I wanted to write something from zero. ← Home A Complete Beginner's Guide to Programming