Think like a programmer
“Everyone in this country should learn to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think.” — Steve Jobs
We need to talk about thinking like a programmer.
If you’ve ever seen an intro to Computer Science, you probably saw that it’s all about thinking. In fact, CS’s introductory lectures define “thinking” as “the process of forming models and drawing conclusions from those models, using methods that involve reasoning.”
Programming is all about thinking
Programming, in the broadest sense of the word, is the art of organizing information into meaningful commands, and executing them in a predictable and repeatable manner. This skill is necessary to accomplish a great many things in the modern world: saving lives, finding a lost object, writing a book, building a factory, or building a house.
Programming is also necessary to make computers more useful. It’s not about replacing workers or replacing machinery; it’s about making computers more useful. For example, software programmers build a better machine with the computers they build. For example, the software programs that tell your computer what to do are called code.
