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Programming Is Everywhere

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18 views3 pages

Programming Is Everywhere

Uploaded by

hassjaved230
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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PROGRAMMING IS EVERYWHERE

Programming is, quite literally, all around us. From the take-out we order, to the movies we stream, code
enables everyday actions in our lives. Tech companies are no longer recognizable as just software
companies — instead, they bring food to our door, help us get a taxi, influence outcomes in presidential
elections, or act as a personal trainer.

When you’re walking down the street, where can you find technology in your environment? Click on the
white circles.

…AND PROGRAMMING IS FOR EVERYONE

For many years, only a few people have known how to code. However, that’s starting to change. The
number of people learning to code is increasing year by year, with estimates around 31.1 million
software developers worldwide, which doesn’t even account for the many OTHER careers that relate to
programming.

Here at Codecademy, our mission is to make technical knowledge accessible and applicable. Technology
plays a crucial role in our economy — but programming is no longer just for software engineers. Any
person can benefit from learning to program — whether it’s learning HTML to improve your marketing
emails or taking a SQL course to add a dose of analysis to your research role.

Even outside of the tech industry, learning to program is essential to participating in the world around
you: it affects the products you buy, the legal policies you vote for, and the data you share online.

So, let’s dig into what programming is.

WHAT IS PROGRAMMING?

Put simply, programming is giving a set of instructions to a computer to execute. If you’ve ever cooked
using a recipe before, you can think of yourself as the computer and the recipe’s author as a
programmer. The recipe author provides you with a set of instructions that you read and then follow.
The more complex the instructions, the more complex the result!

How good are you at giving instructions? Try and get Codey to draw a square!
PROGRAMMING AS COMMUNICATION, or CODING

“Ok, so now I know what programming is, but what’s coding? I’m here to learn how to code. Are they the
same thing?”

While sometimes used interchangeably, programming and coding actually have different definitions.

Programming is the mental process of thinking up instructions to give to a machine (like a computer).

Coding is the process of transforming those ideas into a written language that a computer can
understand.

Over the past century, humans have been trying to figure out how to best communicate with computers
through different programming languages. Programming has evolved from punch cards with rows of
numbers that a machine read, to drag-and-drop interfaces that increase programming speed, with lots of
other methods in between.

pictures of different punchcards

via GIPHY

To this day, people are still developing programming languages, trying to improve our programming
efficiency. Others are building new languages that improve accessibility to learning to code, like
developing an Arabic programming language or improving access for the blind and visually impaired.

There are tons of programming languages out there, each with its own unique strengths and
applications. Ultimately, the best one for you depends on what you’re looking to achieve. Check out our
tips for picking your first language to learn more.

PROGRAMMING AS COLLABORATION

“The problem with programming is not that the computer isn’t logical—the computer is terribly logical,
relentlessly literal-minded.”

Ellen Ullman, Life in Code


When we give instructions to a computer through code, we are, in our own way, communicating with the
computer. But since computers are built differently than we are, we have to translate our instructions in
a way that computers will understand.

Computers interpret instructions in a very literal manner, so we have to be very specific in how we
program them. Think about instructing someone to walk. If you start by telling them, “Put your foot in
front of yourself,” do they know what a foot is? Or what front means? (and now we understand why it’s
taken so long to develop bipedal robots…). In coding, that could mean making sure that small things like
punctuation and spelling are correct. Many tears have been shed over a missing semicolon (;) a symbol
that a lot of programming languages use to denote the end of a line.

But rather than think of this as a boss-employee relationship, it’s more helpful to think about our
relationship with computers as a collaboration.

The computer is just one (particularly powerful) tool in a long list of tools that humans have used to
extend and augment their abilities.

As mentioned before, computers are very good at certain things and well, not so good at others. But
here’s the good news: the things that computers are good at, humans suck at, and the things that
computers suck at, humans are good at! Take a look at this handy table:

table comparing human and computer abilities

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