Like how exactly can a bunch of letters, numbers, and punctuation symbols make your computer do all kinds of things? Plus what happens inside the computer when it executes the code?
In: Technology
I’m gonna try to simplify this super hard:
Your computer runs on basic instructions. Super simple operations from a set it knows how to use, but a versatile enough set to creatively do a lot of things with when you combine them together right. It does this using a computational core (pretty much a calculator or adding machine) and bank of limited memory, where it time after time reads in something, makes a calculation, then stores its value. Sometimes it pulls a value from further away in memory, or stores it in a specific location using a network of electronic components (a bachelor’s in computer science or engineering should give you *half* of an idea of what all is required here).
When a human writes a code, they use a sort of understood “language”. They have sets of instructions, conventions, or things that follow VERY EXACT rules, and feed it into a compiler or interpreter, which will then take this human-written code and translate it into many, many steps of super simple operations to achieve the same thing, in instructions readable by the above.
So where a human might write “print ‘x'”, the computer might get instructions to load memory addresses, update one in an output buffer, send further instructions for related operations, move on to the next instruction address, etc.
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