INTRODUCTION TO PROGRAMMING

If you are very familiar with computers either you work in an IT company or not you will always wonder what their developers do. It alright I have always been curious about what the developers do until I found myself as one, in this article I will be working you through the basic introduction to programming for beginners.

What is a program

To a layman, a program simply means an "even" but to a computer scientist, a program means a set of instructions that is giving to a computer to perform a specific task. If you click on the shutdown button on your personal computer, the computer is going to switch off, it is all because you instruct it to shut down by pressing the shutdown button. Everything about the computer is instructions as it a dumb but intelligent machine. While the act of giving a computer a set of instructions to do is know as "programming".

The person who is writing a program is known as Programmer or developer

How do we program

Before you can give a computer an instruction to do you must understand the language of a computer. The machine has its natural language as humans do. The natural language of the computer is binary and they are represented with 1 and 0.

That is the natural language of the machine. It would be cumbersome for us as humans to communicate with the computer in binary.

So to communicate with the machine that only understands binary, we need we make use of a translator to translate our structured word that was written in an English format to the binary form so that the machine will be able to understand and carry out the given instruction.

The program written by humans could be high-level or low-level languages. High-level programming languages are farther away from the machine language than low-level languages. This “farther away” is usually called an abstraction, but I will not go into this now.

The computer needs a way to understand our human language. To do this, we’ll need a translator.

If a program is written using high-level language that means there is a need for a translator either a compiler or an interpreter.

The difference between a compiler and interpreter is that compiler will pile a bunch of programs(codes) together and run them at once, While an interpreter always translates programs(codes) to machine equivalent language one after the other.

High-Level Language is just a programming language that human use to communicate with the machine and they are of various types examples are :

1. Python
2. Javascript
3. Php
4. Dart

Now that you understood what programming is all about, stay tuned to the azdeveloper blog to learn more about programming. in my next article, we will be moving to introduction to Python Programming Language, thank you.