Technology
 

Programming

From Programmer's Wiki

Programming is the labour of writing instructions for a computer to carry out a certain task. Expressed another way, the programmer "tames" the computer to perform instructions in a certain way, by "telling" the computer in an excruciatingly detailed way how to do those instructions. The programmer is creating a program for the computer to execute, the programmer enhances the program to be able to handle more cases — to be more capable — the programmer connects and adapts the program to other programs, improves it to user and customer needs, collaborates with other programmers, internal sales and customer support personel, and so on.

Contents

[edit] Programming languages

Main article: Programming language

All computer systems have a basic language that can be used for programming called Machine Code. However coding in Machine Code is not practical. It is not designed to be very readable and because different systems may use their own version of machine code it is not portable between different systems. Because of this higher level languages were created that solve these problems. When a program is written in a higher-level language it is then compiled into the machine code that the computer understands.

[edit] Source Code

Source code is the Text representation of the program before it has been compiled. Having the source code allows a programmer to know how a program works so they can fix errors and make other improvements. With Open Source software the Source code is made publicly available so that many programmers can debug the code at the same time.

[edit] Program translation

The following topics have been proposed for this stub section (feel free to expand it!):

  • assemblers
  • compilers
  • interpreters
  • linkers

[edit] Programming tools

[edit] Text Editor

a text editor is a very basic program for editing text files. one of the best examples of this is Notepad, which comes with Microsoft Windows. Programmers often choose to write code with Simple text editors as they do not add extra code into the program like more advanced editors would. However programmers tend to use IDEs for larger programs as they provide significant time savings.

[edit] See Also

partially copied From the Open Source Wiki

Programming