A brief introduction to programming

The first time I tried to learn to program I failed. Even with the help of the internet and the gallons of free time that teenagers possess, I didn’t manage to get anywhere. It wasn’t until years later at university, with a course explaining the basics and a lab partner talking me through what to do, that I wrote and ran my first line of code.

The reason I struggled was that I lacked some fundamental understanding of what programming actually is.

What is a programming language?

Computers are just binary: 1s and 0s, but that’s not what people see when they use a computer. Programming is the way you can control what a computer is doing, but programmers don’t write the binary themselves.

Programming involves writing a file then something else converts it into binary. A programming language determines how the file should be written in order for the conversion to work. The conversion itself is just another program, one written by other people.

Lots of programming involves work done by other people. When writing a program, you often make use of something known as a library, which is a shared collection of code that your program can rely on, usually written by someone else. Think of this like making a cake by buying flour from the shop, rather than farming your own…