What is programming?

Now that Loggerhead Marketing has a shiny new blog, I’ve been thinking about what I should write about for my very first blog post. As a programmer, I’ll be mainly sticking to things related, in one way or another, to programming and technology and its effects on websites and the internet. With changes to the internet and how we use it happening so rapidly, I have so many things I’d like to discuss, but I think it makes sense to start off talking about one of the most basic topics – what is programming?

Often when people ask me what I do and my response is “I’m a programmer”, they just nod their head in agreement accompanied by a blank look on their face. Maybe it’s that they don’t find what I do all that interesting, but I’m hoping it just means they don’t really understand what programming is, and its relationship to the websites we build.

According to Wikipedia, a programming language is “… an artificial language designed to express computations that can be performed by a machine, particularly a computer…” Put more simply, it’s a method of telling a computer to do something in a language it understands. Thus, programming is the act of speaking (writing) such a language.

Just like someone would have to learn another language to communicate with people from another country or culture, programmers have to learn another language to communicate with computers. And, just like there are many different spoken languages across the world, there are many different computer languages. I’ve chosen PHP as the language I use, and I’ll go into more detail about PHP, why I chose it, and why it’s beneficial to our clients in a later article.

Without getting too technical and boring, most people know that computers process information in a binary (1’s and 0’s) format. While there are people who can read and understand binary information, it’s much easier for programmers to write code that has somewhat of a logical meaning to them. That’s why most programming languages are human-readable, meaning that the language is formed out of words and symbols that humans recognize and can base logic on. A simple example of this is a very common statement that many languages use, which is IF … THEN. Almost all languages have a form of this, and it’s a simple, logical statement that says, “if these requirements are met, then do this”. For a website, it could be the task of checking to see if a username matches a certain value, and logging the person in if the name matches the value.

How programming relates to websites and why it’s so important is because websites are a form of interaction between a human and a computer. Since programming is a method of speaking to computers, programmers write the code to allow people (often referred to as the end-user) to interact with the computer without having to know its language. Think of the code we write as the interpreter between yourself and the computer. Without it, the computer wouldn’t know what you wanted to do (as simple as clicking on a link and taking you to the next page). In a nutshell, programming makes a website work.

Programming may not be a glamorous or “cool” profession to most people, but you can thank us next time you update your status on Facebook or tweet about what you just ate for dinner ;)