Lesson 1
How to Talk to the Computer
Chapter 2: What is programming?
It's all about instructing the computer!
Summary:
- Programming \ne coding
- Programming \supset coding
- Programming involves:
- Understanding and formulating the problem
- Designing an algorithm to solve the problem
- Implementing the algorithm
- Machine code is what the computer understands, but us writing machine code will be tedious.
- High-level languages have been developed to help make programming easier.
- Translators convert high-level languages to low-level code:
- Compilers pre-translate codes into a set of low-level instructions, which is then executed.
- Interpreters translate and execute code line by line, on the fly.
- Programming languages need to be unambiguous.
- Spend more time thinking about the problem and developing a clear algorithm before coding.