How Coding and Coders Developed Over a Period of Time

Over the few years, we have been witnessing an increase in the number of people in coding. Even I am also one of them. It involves numbers, characters , visualizations etc. which really excites me.

We all some use kind of gadgets which we require in our everyday life like a mobile phone, tablets, etc. which requires coding so that they can work seamlessely.

HOW CODING INTERACTS WITH DEVICES, APPLICATIONS AND SOFTWARES?

A successful coding displays an image or section of text, opens a website, email, application. This helps people understand about an application for eg as the result of the coding displays like images, text or instructions.

Earlier, Facebook was too slow and difficult to use. For example, if someone posted anything like a photo, thought, etc. and if you don’t open their account ,then its all gone and you cannot see anything they posted. But, after this to gain more audience, coders developed a feature called “News Feed”, which shows you everything in a single page whenever you will log in. When someone will post something, then “Ping” , a notification will pop up. With this, you can also add your Favourites -Artists/Bands/Authors, etc. After few days, this feature won the hearts of many people and the audience started to increase. Then the coders made a plan to create extra “Privacy Settings” to their accounts to ensure a user’s safety. People could “like”, “Comment” or “Share” a post which really excited people.

The same thing happened for Uber which gave an experience to people to book cabs or Amazon for shopping, etc.

CODING LANGUAGES AVAILABLE THEN AND NOW

Few years back, there were few programming languages available. Like in 2010, Java and JavaScripts were the favourites among the coders. Later,in 2015, Python, C++, etc. started coming in the list which made programming a bit easy. By 2019, Python topped the list with PHP, C, R etc in the list as well. Why did Python topped the list? Python became so popular because it’s a very user-friendly language. It is a high-level programming language which emphasize on code readability, vast libraries, and framework. Some of the noteworthy features of Python are:

• Open-source programming language
• Extensive support modules and community development
• Easy integration with web services
• User-friendly data structures
• GUI-based desktop applications

CODERS

Almost every coder has a similar story about the moment when they became mesmerized with coding. For me it was of course numbers and visualizations and trust me I can give my whole day to them. For most it was writing “Hello, World!” in Python which often looks like this:

print(“Hello, World!”)

and hit enter and boom your output is there. You feel like a champion,winner or even Sherlock Holmes!!

The idea of finding the bug itself and going through materials gives us an excitement and joy which is hard to explain. But yes, coding is not easy. It requires you to sit for hours to find solution to a problem and to even find the link. But with more programming languages the coders have developed over time so that they can fix this modern world and find modern solutions therefore making modern technologies like Smart Televsions, Alexa, etc and people are now depeneded on these gadgets for their daily use.

WHAT TYPE OF PSYCHOLOGY MAKES ONE GOOD AT PROGRAMMING?

Some traits are the obvious ones. Coders tend to think about things more logically or you can say analytically and even systematically and they don’t tend to realize that they tend to do this in every situation. They are also curious about how things work and why it works that way. On some days,yes, you will get frustated if you don’t find solution but once you do find then there is no limit of joy. One of the most influential researchers in the field is Thomas Green, a professor at the University of Leeds in the UK. His more recent work has moved away from cognitive models and fancy theories and more toward methods to support informal discussion in productive ways. In his own words [Green97]:

“The way forward is not to make strong, simple claims about how cognitive processes work. The way forward is to study the details of how notations convey information.”

He has developed a framework to facilitate discussions about programming environments. He calls this framework the “Cognitive Dimensions Framework”. This framework consists of 14 relatively independent features that characterize programming environments:

Viscosity resistance to change. How hard is it to introduce small changes to the program?

Hidden Dependencies important links between entities are not visible. A hidden dependency results when one part of a program changes another part in a way that is not overtly apparent in the program text.

Visibility and Juxtaposibility ability to view components easily. Is required material directly accessible without cognitive work?

Imposed Look-ahead Constraints on order of doing things. Does the programming environment force the user to make a decision before the information is available?

Secondary Notation extra information in means other than program syntax. Can statements or primitive elements be grouped or otherwise denoted to provide extra information to the programmer? For example, white space around blocks of code can show related statements.

Closeness of Mapping representation maps to domain. How close is the mapping between the end-user visible problem domain and the programming domain?

Progressive Evaluation ability to check while incomplete. Can parts of the program be tested before the entire program is written?

Hard Mental Operations: operations that tax working memory. Does the programming language lead one to tortured combinations of primitive operations that are painful to de-tangle?

Diffuseness/Terseness succinctness of language

Abstraction Gradient amount of abstraction required, amount possible

Role-expressiveness purpose of a component is readily inferred

Error-proneness syntax provokes slip. Is it easy to make cognitive slips and introduce errors into the code?

Perceptual mapping important meanings conveyed by position, size, color, etc.

Consistency: Similar semantics expressed in similar syntax. Can you infer one part of a language from another part?

Are you ready to be a one of the good programmers and to develop over time?