WHAT IS PROGRAMMING ?

In this blog post, we will decipher the term “programming” and understand its usage and many other related terms.

Understanding Programming in layman terms

Programming is a way to “instruct the computer to perform various tasks”.

Confusing? Let us understand the definition deeply.

“Instruct the computer”: this basically means that you provide the computer a set of instructions that are written in a language that the computer can understand. The instructions could be of various types. For example:

Adding 2 numbers,

Rounding off a number, etc.

Just like we humans can understand a few languages (English, Spanish, Mandarin, French, etc.), so is the case with computers. Computers understand instructions that are written in a specific syntactical form called a programming language.

“Perform various tasks”: the tasks could be simple ones like we discussed above (adding 2 numbers, rounding off a number) or complex ones which may involve a sequence of multiple instructions. For example:

Calculating simple interest, given principal, rate and time.

Calculating the average return on a stock over the last 5 years.

The above 2 tasks require complex calculations. They cannot usually be expressed in simple instructions like adding 2 numbers, etc.

Hence, in summary, Programming is a way to tell computers to do a specific task.

What is Programming Language?

As mentioned above, Computers understand instructions that are written in a specific syntactical form called a programming language. A programming language provides a way for a programmer to express a task so that it could be understood and executed by a computer. Refer our another blog-post "What is programming language?" to know more about programming languages. Some of the popular Programming languages are Python, C, C++, Java, etc.