What is programming

🎉🎈We start with this introduction to programming course 🥳🎈.

There are many programming courses. This one, I must warn you, will not be the shortest, nor the longest. Nor the simplest, nor the most complicated. It may not even be the best. But it is the course that I would have liked to read when I started in this.

The idea of this course is to take a different approach to programming. For this, we are not going to focus on a particular language, we are going to see programming as a process, a set of fundamental concepts and ideas.

Of course, during the course I will give code examples in C++, C#, JavaScript, or Python, among others. This way, we will discover the common aspects found in all programming languages, and the differences that make them unique.

But the most important thing is that we are going to learn to think like programmers. This means breaking down problems into logical steps, designing solutions, and translating those solutions into code.

As we progress, you will see that, regardless of the language you choose in the future, the foundation and fundamentals are common in all of them. If you know the basics, you will be able to tackle any programming challenge.

Then, learning one programming language or another will be much easier. In fact, if you have a strong foundation, moving from one language to another, or learning a new one, will require very little effort.

But first we should see What is programming? We use the term almost every day, but what does it really mean to “program” a machine?

What is programming?

Programming is a discipline that allows us to indicate to a machine how to solve a problem.

Through programming, we can create solutions that allow us to automate tasks, process data efficiently, build applications, and software systems.

Programming predates the existence of computers and programming languages. Before electronics, programming was done mechanically, or hydraulically, for example.

Currently, most of the problems that we are going to solve with a machine will require programming a computer or processor. It is logical, they are some of our most powerful and versatile machines.

To facilitate the task, we have created programming languages, which we use to “communicate with the processor” and rigorously indicate how to solve a problem.

Programming is not writing code

Throughout the course, we will continuously talk about programming languages. In your life as a programmer, you will talk about them so much that it is easy to forget one important thing.

Programming languages are tools, not the end

Get that into your head, programming is not just about writing lines of code in a specific language. Your job, the value you bring as a person 🧍 is not to write code. It is to think and solve a problem.

But in reality, those are good news! Because programming is much broader, interesting, and fun than that. Programming means,

• Being able to analyze a problem
• Understand its structure
• Abstract the entities and relationships that form it
• Determine the requirements that must be met
• Propose a feasible and profitable solution

In that whole list, for now, I haven’t talked about writing a single line of code. In fact, you could use an existing solution, a no-code solution, or even an AI could do part of the code for you, and you would still have programmed!

In summary, programming is a form of logical thinking and problem-solving. It is a skill that allows us to create creative and innovative solutions to complex problems.