What is Programming?

Programming is a way for us to give instructions to a computer. The code behind the computer runs everything that you do, from moving the cursor to watching videos to playing video games. It’s a neat way of telling the computer exactly what you want to do since computers will run the instructions you give them without questioning it (unless SkyNet takes over the world). But here’s the thing: computers don’t understand English, or any other human language. Computers speak in binary, meaning in 1’s and 0’s. Does that mean we have to speak to computers in 1’s and 0’s? Just imagine having to learn how to communicate in binary. It would be so hard for schools to teach and it would be tough for students to grasp.

This is why we have programming languages. There are two types of programming languages: high-level languages and low-level languages. High-level languages are languages such as Java, Python, JavaScript, and C#. These languages are closer to the English language and easy for humans to learn and understand. An example of a low-level language is Assembly, which is closer to machine code. If you’re a computer science major, you may have learned about the Assembly language in a Sparc Architecture class. It’s not a language that many…