what is coding.

This write-up captures what I teach when I get coaching requests. I won’t jump into the code or a setup of any sort. I will teach concepts.

If you work in a software development company as a non-programmer, you may wonder what the programmers do. And you hear new buzzwords everyday. This post was written with you in mind. Whether you are a sales person, a medical doctor, attorney, a business lead, or an accountant, if you’ve ever had it in mind to learn how to code, this is a good place to start.

How this article is organized

This write-up is divided into 4 parts. After reading through each part, you will find a quiz section to help you better recall what you’ve read. Then you’ll find a “going forward” section and answers to the quiz.

Note that each buzzword introduced in this series is in bold , such as algorithm.

Part 1 — What is Programming?

A simple answer would be, “Programming is the act of instructing computers to carry out tasks.” It is often referred to as coding.

So then, what is a computer program? A computer program is a sequence of instructions that the computer executes.

Computer in the definition above is any device that is capable of processing code. This could be smartphones, ATMs, the Raspberry Pi, Servers to name a few.

A Good Analogy for Programming

First, there are patterns to our every day lives. The universe operates in a somewhat predictable way; For example — day and night, seasons, sunrise and sunset. People go through routines such as rising in the morning, going to school or to work. We get instructions from other people such as our superiors at work. How we cook certain recipes can be explained in finite steps.

Second, every time we use smart devices, some code is running in the background. Moving a mouse pointer from one part of your computer screen to the other may seem like a simple task, but in reality, so many lines of code just ran. An act as simple as typing letters into Google Docs leads to lines of code being executed in the background. It’s all code everywhere.

The Natural Language of the Computer

Machines have their natural language like humans do. Computers do not understand the human language. The natural language of computers is the binary code — 1 and 0. These represent two states: on (1) and off (0).

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

Enter Programming Languages

To communicate with machines who speak binary, we do so in a language that’s closer to our own natural language. Such as English, French, Swahili or Arabic. Programming languages are close to our natural languages. But they are more structured and must be thoroughly learned.

They 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 we will not go into that in this series. Let’s not get distracted :)

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

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