eli5 How do people code with binary?

Question

Like I get that it can be a 1 or a 0, and that stores information, but how do you get information out of that? And how do people code with it? Seems like all it could store is numbers

Edit: Thank you all, this is very helpful

In: Technology

Answer 1

It **can** only store numbers. But we break those numbers into groups and then use those groups to lookup other stuff in a dictionary. One such dictionary called ASCII for example uses groups of 8. So 01000001 in the dictionary is A. 01000010 is B and so on.

People don’t write code directly in binary, they write it in English and software “compiles” that into binary for the computer to understand.