Programming? Why, What and How

We all might have heard of the most renowned word ‘programming’, I would suggest a beginner should always start by asking themselves most important three-questions Why do one program? What and How do they do it?

Before getting into the answers let’s talk more about the three-questions approach, this is the best one so far it helps you understand the importance and application of any concept. Apply this on anything while learning something new, you should be able to notice how easy it gets.

Let’s get back to the questions firstly, why — to get our job done. To understand this let us first consider how we usually get any of our work done, either we do it our self or we approach someone for that. The way we approach a machine to get our work done is nothing but programming. Like we use language and gestures as a means of communication, machines also have languages with well defined structures.

But being a human why develop more machine languages while we have a plenty around us?

Imagine machine as a tiny little baby which does not understand any language that we speak till certain age. Now how do we talk to babies — blabber like a baby.

Yea, unless or until you tell a machine in very detail it does not understand like babies don’t. All the languages spoken across the globe are well defined with a set alphabets, phonetics, grammar and structure. Alphabets, grammar, phonetics, and structure are nothing but the machine language rules for programming which are well explained by data structures.

Having said why and what programming is let’s jump to my most favorite question how.

While understanding this question the importance of data structures kicks in. Consider statements ‘Four liters of Roses’ or ‘Open can you the door?’

What! Liters and roses? and placement of words in next statement, terribly wrong right? It only makes sense when appropriate units are used for appropriate kinds and using the words only in an order following all the predefined rules. Data structures are meant to help us in dealing with machine language grammar so that the programs make sense to the computer. Let’s talk more about data structures in the next article. 😊