Computer programming, simplified?
To many, computer programming and software seem a bit like “magic”. I know it was for me before I learned (now over five years ago!).
Somehow, someone writes all this funny text that seems incomprehensible and builds complex software applications that can do anything from capturing a photo to online shopping.
How does this work?
Well, I’m going to challenge myself and do my best to explain as simply as I can in my own words.
Broken down really simply, programming is writing instructions telling a computer how to manipulate data. These instructions are called software.
What is data, though? Data can come in many forms, but generally it can be reduced to the word information.
This information (data) is usually sourced by input from the user, other external sources, or built into the software by the developer. Often, software receives and manipulates information (data) from all three of these sources.
Any software will have input and output. Inputs are the data (information) the software receives. Inputs can come from the user of the software, the computer system itself, or external software.
Outputs are what the software produces with the inputs, based on how the software was written to manipulate the data. Sometimes the output is more data used within the software, other times it is a visible information (data) provided to the user, like the tap of a button in an interface.
It may be helpful to think of this in terms of a vehicle.
An input is like turning the steering wheel on a vehicle. The information (data) of how far you’ve turned the wheel is given to the steering system which (manipulates that data) causes the wheels to turn (the output).
So, in summary, programming is writing instructions for manipulating information called data. This data is passed around, transformed, and manipulated according to the instructions and an output is produced.