Programming code tells the computer to do something, but what makes the code actually mean anything to the computer?
In: Engineering
A computer at the very basic is just a machine with an on/off switch. 1 is the command to turn it on and 0 is the command to turn it off.
Modern computers are a complex assembly of bajillions such machines which can do a lot of different stuff based on the right on/off configuration.
The most direct way for humans to configure computer to do their bidding is by inserting the right string of on/off configuration with a bunch of 1s and 0s. These are what is known as machine language.
But due to the sheer complexity and huge numbers of machines involved in a modern computer, this is not really efficient nor human friendly so we developed a shortcut.
We saved a bunch of frequently used on/off or 0/1 configurations to words we can recognize. So for example 0100110101010 010110010 1010001011 1010111010 can probably be the configuration needed to display a simple apple on the screen based on which pixel should be turned on and which should be turned off.
We are going to need that a lot and we don’t want to waste time typing that long string of 1 and 0s each time so we automate it by saving the whole string as “draw apple”. Nicely short, understandable and easy to remember. This process of translating human words to 0 and 1s is called compiling. So the next time we want an apple displayed, we just type in “draw apple” and the compiler automatically transform it to a bunch of 0 and 1s and set the computer to the desired state.
Overtime we managed to assemble a vast collection of such commands enabling us to do more and more complex configurations by using a relatively short and understandable way. These are the programming code we end up with.
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