It’s true, we do all our coding at the same time and we start each new project right away. This means the first task for a programmer is to figure out how to solve the problem that they have and start writing code. In the beginning, that is pretty difficult and requires a lot of work and a lot of trial and error.
I am not saying this because I am a bad programmer. I am saying this because I want to say that we, as programmers, are not bad at all. We are good at what we do and good at figuring out the best way to do it. But that is different from programming at a higher level and working with a program that is not just a bunch of lines of code.
It’s hard to describe in words what the world looks like without looking at your computer.
It is more like looking at a picture on a screen than looking at a picture on a computer screen. When I look at a picture on a screen, I can’t really see the lines and the colors that are being used. The only way I can see them is with a good computer monitor. When I look at a picture on the computer, I have to zoom in (on a computer screen) and read the screen with my eyes.
So why is it that we can’t look at our computer screens with our eyes? There is one reason. We can read our code, but our code is not our computer. In many cases, the code we are reading is compiled into a binary or object code file. But there is also a version of the code we can read with a text editor or IDE, and that version is called a source code file.
Source code files give us the ability to edit and improve our source code, but they are not a substitute for looking at a computer screen and reading the code. The source code format that we are most familiar with, C++, has no visual representation that we can read with our eyes. We can read the source code in a text editor, but it’s not the same as the version of the code we can view on the computer.
Source code files are a fairly new development in Computer Programming, and they have been around for a while. C++ was a language that was used for programming computers, but it wasn’t until the 1980’s when C++ started to gain popularity. Source code files are the new thing for us. In fact, the C++ standard library is the new thing for us too, and it was only used to implement many of the core features of Visual Studio and the Visual Studio IDE.
C++ is an “old new thing” too, but it has been around a long time, and was the language used to write the first modern Operating Systems. There are lots of things that C++ is doing that modern C# doesn’t do.
When we were writing C++, we had to go through every single piece of code in every program and make sure we were never making the same mistake twice. Luckily, many of the basic programming fundamentals in C are actually pretty good, so we have a good starting point.
C, despite its age, is still one of the most widely used programming languages out there (and I’m pretty sure it’s still used in one or two other things too). It’s the language that allows us to write the programs that our cars and computers use to communicate with other equipment. In the same way that people write their own programs for their computers, people write programs for their cars, and many programmers code their entire lives in one language.
