I don’t understand what the starting point is. Do they just open a word document and start creating lines of code or is there some type of program that’s specifically used?
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Trying to keep this at the 5yo level….
At a high level the answer to your question is yes. The vast majority of computer programs (everything from a web page to an app on your phone) start life as a series of text files written by a human.
While it would be possible to do all that in MS Word and just save all the files as plain text with the right names in the right places, that’s not the best tool for the job, so we tend to use different text editors to create and organize those text files.
These tools make it quicker to write the text (or code as we call it), because a lot of the text we write is made up of some common patterns of words and symbols. Typing those same patterns out over and over would be repetitive, so we use tools that auto complete for us. In addition for some types of programs, there are a lot of files that are almost the same for every program you write, so the tools we use spilt out those files automatically and we just change a couple of lines here and there, rather than have to type the whole thing out every time.
You know how MS Word has tools like spellcheck to highlight when you’ve made a spelling error? The editors we use have a different set of tools that highlight when we’ve made mistakes, and they use different colors to show different types of code to make it easier for us to recognize.
The tools we use just make writing the text easier, we still end up typing out the vast majority of it though.
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