What is Programming

Imagine you are a famous pastry chef aka programmer and you got a last minute call from a friend, Elon, asking you to make a huge favour and bake 100,000 cupcakes of various flavours shaped like little spaceships for his most important presentation of the year tomorrow. His previous chef had to unfortunately cancel last minute and you are the only one who can save the event.

You are up for the challenge, but you know you will need some help to deliver an order of such importance in a timely manner. Luckily, you have another friend, robot Bobert🤖 aka computer, who is know for being extraordinarily fast at baking as long as you provide him with simple step-by-step instructions aka program. They have to be extremely precise if you want your cupcakes to turn out as expected. Bobert is only able to do what you tell him, if something is not on the recipe it won't get done. For example, if you miss the instructions on preheating the oven before using it, he would use the cold oven instead or if you won't specify to mix the ingredients in the bowl he will just dump them right where he is.

You sit down to write down the recipe including every single step, dimension, time and quantity. You carefully check and double check your recipe to make sure nothing is missing. Once you feel you are ready, you pass the recipe for five test cupcakes before committing to a larger batch to Bobert and he makes them in less than a second. Woah! That was fast! Thank you, Bobert!

You try the test cupcakes and notice that chocolate flavour is a bit off. You review the recipe and notice a small mistake in the chocolate amount. You fix it and ask Bobert to use the updated recipe for making another test chocolate cupcake. He bakes it in just a moment and hands it to you cooled to a perfect temperature. Now, happy with the result and how all flavours turn out you ask Bobert to bake the entire batch.

Bobert is back to work, this time to bake all 100,000 cupcakes, and make the even a success!

Summary

• Program is the list of clear and precise instructions understandable by computer.
• Programmer is a person creating a program to achieving a certain goal.
• Computer is a machine that is able to process programs at a very high speed.
• Programming is the process or an act of creating a computer program in order to accomplish a certain result.