What Is Coding?
SYED MUSTAFA HASSAN
Mobile App Developer || Open-Source Contributor || 2x Cisco, 2x DataCamp, 1x Microsoft, 1x Google, 1x AWS, & Meta Certified || Community Founder & Lead @ MLSC-MAJU || Beta Microsoft Learn Student Ambassador
All your questions about coding answered in this in-depth guide about the basics of coding.
You’ve probably heard the phrase, “Learn to code,” but what does it mean? Just what is coding? How does it work? What is it used for? Why learn it? And how long does it take to learn?
If you’ve got questions about coding, read on to find the answers. In this article, we’ll walk you through the basic essentials you need to know about coding. We’ll start by looking at what coding means, how it works, and what it’s for. Then we’ll take a tour of the programming languages used in coding and the different levels of programming used to code. Finally, we’ll consider some of the reasons you might want to learn coding and how long you can expect it to take.
Depending on why you're reading this article, you may be interested in a career in coding, or you may be looking for someone to help you with a coding project. Reading this article can provide you with background information to help you hire a coding tutor or consultant. But first, you need to know what you're looking for
What Does Coding Mean??
An Example of Coding
Other Examples of Practical Coding Applications
The Purpose of Coding
Coding Steps
The Tools of Coding
How Does Coding Work?
What Is Computer Code Used for?
Types of Programming Languages
Levels of Programming
Why Learn Coding?
What Does Coding Mean??
Coding can be defined as the process of creating instructions that tell computers what to do. The set of instructions is called a code. It also may be referred to as a program.
Because of this, coding is often a synonym for programming, or the process of writing a computer program. However, sometimes a distinction is drawn between the actual writing of a code and broader programming tasks.
Programs are written in codes called programming languages which translate human instructions into information computers can process.
An Example of Coding
To illustrate coding, let’s start with a straightforward example:
The Assignment: Writing a One-line Python Code
Let’s say that you’re taking an introduction to coding class and the teacher gives you an assignment to write a one-line code that tells a computer to have a screen display the message, “Hello!” You will be writing this code in one of today’s most popular programming languages,?Python.
What You Need to Write in Python
To create the code, you would use a text editing program, which is a program that lets you enter plain text without the type of formatting you would use in a word processing program. A popular text editor for programming is Sublime Text, or you could use a free program such as Notepad++.
You also would need to have Python installed on your computer. Many computers already have it installed. If you don’t have it installed, you can download it free. Installing Python yourself and finding your file can get involved if you don’t have experience. If you want to see how coding works without trying to install Python, you can use an online interface that replicates a Python environment provided by web developer site W3Schools.
If you were coding with Python installed on your computer, you first would create a file in your text editing program by opening the app, giving your file a name, and saving it. For instance, you might name your file “Hello.py”. The “py” extension means that this is a Python file.
Creating Your Python Code
After creating your file, you would type these instructions into the file:
print(“Hello!”)
This is instructing the computer to perform an action called “print” on the variable “Hello!”
The action “print” is called a function, meaning a code that tells the computer to perform a specific task. The print function tells the computer to take whatever variable is entered into the parentheses and print it on a screen or on a printer.
The variable is known as a parameter or argument, depending on the context and who’s talking. (We won’t get into the difference between a parameter and an argument here, except to mention that many people tend to use the terms interchangeably, but technically they’re distinct. We don’t need to worry about that here though.) In this case, the variable is “Hello!”
So this instruction is telling the computer to take the variable “Hello!” and print it to a computer screen. Whatever text appears inside the quotation marks will be printed, so when this program is run successfully, the screen should show:
Hello!
After typing this code into your file, you would save your updated file.
Running Your Python Code
Now you can close your file and run it using a text interface called a command line. A command line is a way of entering commands into your computer using text only, without using a mouse.
To run your file, you would open your command line program, navigate to the directory where you saved your file, and enter the command to run the file. (We won’t get into how to navigate directories or run files right now, but you can learn how Python handles these tasks from a tutorial such as that provided by?Datacamp.)
When you run your program, if you did everything right, your command line interface should display:
Hello!
Debugging Your Python Code
Your command line interface won’t display this if something was done incorrectly. For example, if you misspelled the word “print”, you might get an error message. In that case, you’d need to go back, check your program file, and figure out what went wrong. This part of coding is called “debugging”.
Other Examples of Practical Coding Applications
In the example above, the code you wrote only had one line with one instruction and one variable. In practice, programs designed to perform real-life tasks typically have many lines with many variables. Instead of writing a program telling a computer to print a line on a screen, someone with advanced programming skills might write a program to:
These types of tasks can involve complex data input and instructions. For example, to forecast the weather, a programmer would need to create a program that can:
To create this type of program, you’d need to know how to:
As this illustrates, the skills required for coding range from very simple to very advanced. Writing a program to run a website usually requires less training than writing one to run a factory, although this may not be the case for very complex websites. This is one reason people with advanced coding skills can earn a high income.
Now that we’ve considered some examples of coding, let’s flesh out our definition of coding by taking a closer look at the purpose of coding, the steps involved, and the tools used.
The Purpose of Coding
In general, the purpose of any program code is to tell a computer what data to use and what operations to perform on the data to achieve a desired result. A computer program may be used for tasks such as:
In general, coding may be used to program a computer for any task which involves repeating routine steps in response to input data.
Coding Steps
The process of creating a program code involves several steps:
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These last few steps may need to be repeated to get a program to do what it’s supposed to do without mistakes. Coding is a process of continuous correction, improvement, and optimization.
The Tools of Coding
Programmers rely on a number of tools when it comes to coding. These include:
These are just a few of the tools used in coding. Programmers have developed many specialized tools to make the task of coding easier.
How Does Coding Work?
Now that we have some idea of what coding is, let’s take a look at how it works:
On and Off
To understand how coding works, you need to understand how a computer?stores?and processes information. Computer hardware storage devices typically use one of a few methods to store data:
What all these methods have in common is that they have two possible states. For instance, with semiconductor storage, a transistor can be on or off. If you have many transistors, you can have many combinations of transistors that are on or off, but ultimately, each individual transistor is either on or off.
In programming code, these on and off states are represented by using numbers:
This creates a code called a binary code.
Binary Code
Binary code is so called because each digit can have only two possible numbers: 1 or 0. A binary code can be used to instruct a computer to detect whether a hardware storage location is in an on or off state. It can also be used to tell the computer to turn a location on or off.
Binary code is what enables computers to store and process data. To do this, binary code needs to be translated into a code humans can understand and work with.
This is done by applying the binary number system, which represents numbers using a base-2 code instead of our normal base-10 code, meaning that each digit can only use two numbers: 1 or 0.
For example:
Binary code can be used to represent numbers, but it also can represent other things, including:
Binary code also can represent operations for a computer to perform on stored data, such as:
This enables computers to store any type of data or perform any task which can be symbolized in binary code.
However, binary code is not easy for humans to work with directly because long strings of 1s and 0s are hard to read. To solve this problem, computer programmers have invented languages that convert normal human vocabulary into coded commands that computers in turn can interpret as binary code. This is done by converting binary code into other codes which are closer to human language.
From Binary Code to Source Code
To get from binary code to something humans can read, let’s look briefly at another code binary code can be translated into: hexadecimal code.
Hexadecimal code uses a base-16 instead of a base-2. Each digit contains up to 16 possible values, including the numbers 0 through 10 as well as the letters A through F. Because each digit can contain 16 values, a hexadecimal code can store more information per digit than binary code. For example, to represent the number 16:
To represent 10:
Now because 16 is a multiple of 2, any binary code can be converted into hexadecimal code. This means that hexadecimal code can be used as shorthand to store binary code using a fewer amount of digits than you would need to express the same value in binary.
Using the same principle, programmers have developed languages that allow everyday human language to be coded into commands and variables which then can be translated into binary code. These languages are called source codes. For example, a source code might include the command “print” instead of a binary code representing this command. Software written in one or more intermediary languages is then run to translate the source code into binary code so the computer can execute physical actions on its own device or connected devices.
What Is Computer Code Used for?
Code is used for any application which involves a computer, smartphone, or mobile device. This includes:
As use of computers and mobile devices has become integrated into society, the range of industries in need of such applications has grown. Some of the types of employers in most need of programmers include:
Any business that depends on computers, maintains an e-commerce presence, or stores a large amount of data, needs programmers.
Types of Programming Languages
There are many programming languages and many ways to?classify?them. The simplest way is to classify them based on how close they are to binary code. Viewed this way, languages broadly can be organized into a hierarchy starting with ones that are designed for machines and ascending as they become closer to human language:
Machine and assembly languages together are often referred to as low-level languages.
There also are languages that translate between these different levels of programming languages:
Within the category of high-level languages, there are numerous languages and many ways to classify them. One of the most important distinctions is between languages that use different programming paradigms (methods) to communicate instructions to machines:
An example of an imperative language is Fortran, designed for scientific applications. An example of a declarative language is Lisp, originally designed for mathematical applications and often used for artificial intelligence. These aren’t today’s most popular languages, but they serve well to illustrate some basic categories of high-level languages.
Levels of Programming
Programming levels fall into two main groupings based on how close they are to machine or human language:
Both levels of programming are necessary to run computers. Larger companies may have specialists in both areas. Demand for low-level programmers tends to be higher in fields such as computer engineering and electrical engineering, where programmers work more closely with computer hardware, while high-level programming is more closely associated with computer science and software development.
Why Learn Coding?
So why learn coding? There are a number of excellent reasons:
These are all reasons you might want to consider learning coding.
How Long Does It Take to Learn Coding?
How long it takes to learn to code depends on your learning aptitude, how much coding you want to learn, and what your goals are:
As a general rule, if you’re learning coding to do a specific task, it won’t take as much time as if you’re learning coding to go into a programming career. However, you can learn enough coding to make a career transition before earning a computer science or computer engineering degree.