I normally consider myself pretty handy with computers, but I’m no programmer. I know GitHub is primarily for programmers, but I often find GitHub pages when looking for specific programs, and always end up walking away frustrated because anything I try to download just gives me a whole bunch of unfamiliar file-names and what I’m guessing is some uncompiled data? I really don’t know, and it just confuses me what I’m supposed to do in order to actually execute files I find on GitHub? I’ve heard something about Python and something about Cmd (Is that Windows Command Line Prompt?) and whenever I look up tutorials or guides for GitHub I find primer videos for programmers, not user friendly newbie guides for people who just want to download a piece of software.
In: Technology
Github is a code repository to store different versions of the code and for multiple people working on a project to collaborate and share their code and produce releases. most of what you use day to day are compiled programs. They take the sourcecode, and then compile it to create executablles (exe as an example). A lot of Github repositories dont provide a compiled version of the code, that is often released their site or through other avenues. For interpreted languages (python, javascript, etc.) you need something that can run that code. You can install Python and then run python.exe to execute the script that you downloaded. Python is interpreting the code on the fly and executing it for you. Compiled programs are what you are most familiar with and require a compiler which are not too common and can proprietary.
Its like getting a take and bake pizza. You have a pizza, you just gotta bake it. Which means you need an oven 🙂
Latest Answers