A Beginner’s Guide to What exactly is coding?

When we think about coding a picture with many lines of not-so-understandable words comes into our mind. Have you ever wondered what these words are and what does this code do? Then you have come to the right place!!!

A piece of code from nowhere

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To have a better understanding of anything, we should know what it means literally. Let’s look at what coding means ‘literally’ :

Coding: Convert (the words of a message) into a code so as to convey a secret meaning.

Eg: Morse code

So, when we say we are coding in a computer, we are in reality converting the words of our message for the computer to better understand the meaning of our message.

Let’s look at an example. When we want to print out “Hello World”, we use special code to convey the message to computer that it has to print “Hello World”. The code in python3 is given below:

print(“Hello World”)
>>Hello World

The above code prints out “Hello World” to the console. Congrats…🤩 You have just written your first few lines of code.

Hello World!🤩

Now, let’s look at coding in a technical perspective:

Coding is the process of using programming languages to develop apps, websites and software.

Without it, we’d have none of the major technology we’ve come to rely on such as Facebook, our smartphones, the browser we choose to view our favorite blogs or even the blogs themselves. It all runs on code.

Simply put, Coding is the process of using a programming language to get a computer to behave how you want it to.

How does Coding work?

So, how does computer understand and execute print(“Hello World”). The answer, it doesn’t. Let’s take a closer look at computers to answer this question.

Computer is nothing but a collection of on/off switches(transistors). Different results are obtained due to different combinations of transistors being switched on and off.

Each transistor is represented by either a 0 or 1, i.e binary code. Binary code is grouped into bytes, groups of 8 digits or 8 transistors. Eg: 11001010

Modern computers have billions of transistors to cater different combinations of results.

Assemblers and Translators convert our code into binary code and finally the output is displayed. Look at the picture for detailed process.

Python to binary

Finally, our code is converted into binary, where the computations are carried out and the result is again converted to high-level language for us to understand.

What’s Next

To know more about programming and related topics follow my blog. Please share your views in comments section.

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Published by sri

I am a data science enthusiast and I also love programming. Music, blogging and reading novels are my other interests.

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