What is Programming?
In this blog post, we will decipher the term “programming” and understand its usage and many other related terms.
Understanding Programming in layman terms
Programming is a way to “instruct the computer to perform various tasks”.
Confusing? Let us understand the definition deeply.
“Instruct the computer”: this basically means that you provide the computer a set of instructions that are written in a language that the computer can understand. The instructions could be of various types. For example:
Adding 2 numbers,
Rounding off a number, etc.
Just like we humans can understand a few languages (English, Spanish, Mandarin, French, etc.), so is the case with computers. Computers understand instructions that are written in a specific syntactical form called a programming language.
“Perform various tasks”: the tasks could be simple ones like we discussed above (adding 2 numbers, rounding off a number) or complex ones which may involve a sequence of multiple instructions. For example:
Calculating simple interest, given principal, rate and time.
Calculating the average return on a stock over the last 5 years.
The above 2 tasks require complex calculations. They cannot usually be expressed in simple instructions like adding 2 numbers, etc.
