What is programming

What is Programming?
In this blog post, we will decipher the term “programming” and understand its usage and many other related terms.

Understanding Programming in layman terms
Programming is a way to “instruct the computer to perform various tasks”.

Confusing? Let us understand the definition deeply.
“Instruct the computer”: this basically means that you provide the computer a set of instructions that are written in a language that the computer can understand. The instructions could be of various types. For example:

Adding 2 numbers,
Rounding off a number, etc.
Just like we humans can understand a few languages (English, Spanish, Mandarin, French, etc.), so is the case with computers. Computers understand instructions that are written in a specific syntactical form called a programming language.

“Perform various tasks”: the tasks could be simple ones like we discussed above (adding 2 numbers, rounding off a number) or complex ones which may involve a sequence of multiple instructions. For example:

Calculating simple interest, given principal, rate and time.
Calculating the average return on a stock over the last 5 years.
The above 2 tasks require complex calculations. They cannot usually be expressed in simple instructions like adding 2 numbers, etc.