What does it mean to code?

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People say that learning to code is a very useful skill. What does it mean exactly?

I can do data analysis and visualization in python and R. Does that mean I can code? Or does coding mean full stack developers?

Is coding a general umbrella term for all types of programming (including excel)?

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8 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Coders are to computers are what builders are to buildings.

You take some tools (your coding language and knowledge) and build something new from scratch.

If you can do stuff in Python, then yeah, you can code. Depending on what you’re specifically doing it might not be very COMPLEX code, but it’s still technically code. Coding isn’t magic performed exclusively by IT savants, like all skills it runs a spectrum. Some people can code up an entire ecosystem from scratch unaided, some people spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a file to export as a CSV.

Coding is a general umbrella term for all types of programming, but there are some caveats. I don’t think Excel would count as code, personally, and more significantly there’s also a technical difference between CODING and SCRIPTING. Both are very similar in terms of how you actually go about them (e.g. a decent powershell script can look pretty similar to code from an actual coding language), but while coding generally involves creating new things from scratch, scripting tends to be more about manipulating things that already exist. So you’d write code to make a piece of database software, then once it’s done you’d write scripts to do things within that software (e.g. complex reports or conditional updates etc.)

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