What is programming

Hello World. Here is Switch. Today, I propose a theoretical introduction to programming.

While lot of people see programming as quite a simple task, consisting of writing some phrases to make lot of things works, not a lot understand the true concepts behind programmation.

As you may know, a computer is just a simple logical calculator using only a suite of binary values (0 or 1). All those binary values are stored in limited spaces entity and each communication is done by aggregating and computing logical interaction between values.

History

Programming and computer sciences originated from automated devices and message encryption. From very simple encoded message or music sequencer to the advanced Enigma, mathematical theories and technologies behind the automation scene evolved, being more abstract and complex as time passed.

The first accepted publication of a computer program is attributed to Ada Lovelace in 1843. She proposed an algorithm computing sequence of Bernouilly numbers using the Analytical Engine.

It lifted the door to modern programming. The bases proposed by the Analytical Engine where improved times after time, allowing data storage, control panel and so on then moving from mechanical engines to electric computers.

Following the creation of controllable electronic computers, machine code langages appeared. They allowed represent algorithmic processes to machines in a very basic ways. Assembly langage are hard to read for human and requires a lot of knowledge in computer sciences to create optimised program.

This lead to the creation of High Level languages and the concept of compilation. Compilation is a way to translate human readable code to machine langage or a lower levelled one.

Programming ?

Programming is an application of mathematical theories to recreate known interaction. Though nowaday mathematical is less and less present in programmation as high level languages provides a human readable syntaxes to describes programs, advanced theorie like artificial intelligence are still heavily reliant on mathematical concepts.

Basically, an informatics program is just a suite of action required to compute a result, in other world, an algorithms. Anything you will do while manipulating a computer use an algorithmic process behind the hood.

So the job of a programmer is to describe the better fit algorithms to match user requirements and system limitation. You will not use the same algorithm to sort list depending on the machine it will be deployed on and the knowledge you have about list to sort.

Hope to be useful 🙂

Sources

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_programming

More documents

Ada Lovelace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace
Bernouilly numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli_number
Analytical Engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_Engine