Why must a program be decompiled before viewing its code? If the computer is running the program, shouldn’t we be able to see what it’s running?
In: Technology
The problem with computers is that they are running stuff at the limit of human understanding. Even with source code written by humans, for humans, to be as readable as possible, understanding what is going on can be hard.
Also, there is a layered approach humans use to do even more. You can create a windowing layer where programs can request windows to draw on, and your layer simplifies the entire thing so human programmer creating those windows can just think of windows as things computer understands.
Compiling program into ones and zeroes for CPU throws away every bit of effort put into readability and instead tries to just squeeze efficiency. All the different abstraction layers get collapsed into one, so all that separation of tasks is gone trying to read that.
You can try to read those ones and zeroes. People sometimes do it. But it’s a very human-unfriendly business compared to reading source code on higher level language.
And the cool thing is, sometimes this source code can be partially recovered. So if you can do that it’s gonna make your experience much, much easier.
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