Here we are in the era of information sharing across oceans and continents, lets say kudos to computer science and each and every individual who made this possible in their own way.
My belief is that you needn’t be an engineer or a master to be a good programmer. If you apply your mind and are good at analyzing a problem and logically deriving the result,
there you go, you are programming already.
Every person is a programmer to say, the mind is a mini-super computer storing millions of bytes of data- visual, speech, audio all safely tucked away in memory.
Well, some people need to prod their brains more than the others to retrieve information. When you think about this in simple terms - you have already understood the concepts
of programming you see.
Specialized education does help, but, everyone starts off somewhere, you just don’t reach the zenith without using a ladder.(placed on the ground).
Charles Babbage is known as the father of Computers. The basic concepts of programming originated from the very familiar ’Abacus’, used in kindergarten as a tool for counting.
Just as we use different verbal languages to communicate within our community, there are various languages used for programming e.g. **BASIC, Pascal, C, C+, FORTRAN,
LISP, and PROLOG **etc., to communicate with the problem and getting a result.
And, just as every language has its own ’Lipi’/script, every programming language uses its own style of scripting. Almost all of them use the following logical trail:
a) What is the problem?
b) Why is the problem occurring?
c) How do we solve it?
d) Possible solutions. choose one
e) Implement it
d) Test to see if this works
e) If yes, lets use it:-) if not, go back to d) and choose another one.
f) All’s well that ends well, but, like any vehicle that runs, every product needs maintenance, so maintain the product.
The above is known as ’System Development Life Cycle’ in the professional world. The Life cycle involves entire lifetime of a product from start to finish:
Analysis, Design, Coding(Programming), Testing, Implementation and Maintenance.
So, you see every programming language uses these concepts to write code in their own script.
More next time around.
PS: I am writing this article to benefit the likes of many of my friends and some elders who have computers and want to learn and know more . So, if it’s a little too basic for the others - sorry.