Comments on: A little structure goes a long way http://twwilliams.com/blog/2006/02/22/a-little-structure-goes-a-long-way/ Discovering and learning Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:53:18 -0400 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9 hourly 1 By: Tommy’s Blog » Changes in attitude with no changes in latitude http://twwilliams.com/blog/2006/02/22/a-little-structure-goes-a-long-way/comment-page-1/#comment-18 Tommy’s Blog » Changes in attitude with no changes in latitude Fri, 24 Feb 2006 14:12:44 +0000 http://twwilliams.com/blog/2006/02/22/a-little-structure-goes-a-long-way/#comment-18 [...] Every piece of software that you use, from your Web browser to your favorite game to your operating system, starts out as source code: a set of instructions that tells the computer what to do. We’re all familiar with the idea that computers only understand binary code – a bunch of 1s and 0s. But it’s terribly hard for humans to write a meaningful program in binary. So we have programming languages: C++, Java, C#, PHP, Smalltalk, Python, Ruby, Scheme, and many more. These let programmers write things like printf(”hello world”); rather than a long string of ones and zeroes. In order for the computer to understand printf(”hello world”); the source code needs to be translated for the computer. That translation from source code to something that the computer can understand is called compiling. [...] [...] Every piece of software that you use, from your Web browser to your favorite game to your operating system, starts out as source code: a set of instructions that tells the computer what to do. We’re all familiar with the idea that computers only understand binary code – a bunch of 1s and 0s. But it’s terribly hard for humans to write a meaningful program in binary. So we have programming languages: C++, Java, C#, PHP, Smalltalk, Python, Ruby, Scheme, and many more. These let programmers write things like printf(”hello world”); rather than a long string of ones and zeroes. In order for the computer to understand printf(”hello world”); the source code needs to be translated for the computer. That translation from source code to something that the computer can understand is called compiling. [...]

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