What is Programming? #
Programming consists of many things, but at its core, it’s about solving problems. Writing code and implementing a solution come after first thinking through a solution for the problem. After all, there would be no need to write programs if we didn’t need to solve something.
Builders build things because people need/want things built—right? Similarly, programmers write programs because people need (or want to create) programs.
Think of the apps on a smartphone: social media, camera, video editing, messaging apps, games. Each one is an application written by a group of people—sometimes by just a single person—each spanning a different area: web development, microcontrollers, command-line tools, hardware, the cloud, infrastructure (like servers), and more recently, LLMs and their interfaces like ChatGPT.
So when thinking about the word programming, it’s not just about someone building a web or mobile application—these ones are just the most visible examples. It’s about building something that solves a problem and/or modifies data (more on this later). Even a calculator needed a programmer to define the logic that makes it perform the operations we all see calculators do.
At the heart of every solution is data transformation: Starting from a beginning state a program does some thing that converts it to some final state.
But, what problems? #
That depends on what the programmer is working on. There’s no single definition of what kinds of problems programmers solve—but generally, they involve computers in some way or another.
As the chapters go on, it will become more evident that programming itself isn’t the hardest part. In fact, it’s often the easiest. The real challenge is everything around it—understanding the problem, designing a good solution, and building something that lasts. Writing the code becomes almost like a race against maintenance.