How to Code: What is coding really?
An absolute beginner’s breakdown.
As a beginner trying to get Computer science 101. coding and its meaning may sound very vague and intangible. Putting more effort into getting an encouraging picture must’ve been met with resistance, so, you could’ve committed yourself to a potential gradual big picture. Though what I think is so much of your drive and passion as a beginner will stem from that infatuation with the core idea, and what spread up from there.
“Coding is the primary method for allowing intercommunication between humans and machines.”As defined by technopedia.
So, what coding really is? As per the definition above, coding is the form of communication between humans and a computer. It is the language that we use to speak to computers, and, the one they use to understand and talk back to us.
Now, how does this occur? The way in which this happens is at its clearest in the oldest, rawest forms of coding. It is when coding used to occur in correspondence to the computer’s original way of working. Machine code. It looks like the Figure1 below. Machine code is the rawest form and it interacts with computer components to perform tasks in the computer’s raw form of operating, which is 0s and 1s (so do all programming languages after conversion into this byte code form).
1s and 0s are the representation of what is happening fundamentally in the computer’s unit. The computer unit includes many essential components that work together to execute arithmetic, logical, and storage tasks …etc. These components live on a board. The 1s and 0s are actually the absence or presence of an electric current on that board as shown in Figure2. And the alternation of these is what creates a digital signal as shown in Figure3. A group of other components on the board would help make advanced use of these alternating currents (electric engineering details so) for the execution of logical tasks…etc.
This machine code would later go through so many phases of enhancement to help with learning speed and error rates. Making coding so much easier to learn and use. Modern programming languages use English-like commands and have an elegant and simple look to them, as well as more reliability.
So simply put, coding is the language used to communicate tasks to the computer by interacting with its electricity, and, used to get the computer to communicate back to us. It is coding that makes computers so usable by providing them with attractive and usable software that makes life easier.
