Learning to Program

From Source Code to 0’s and 1’s

You don’t need to know the details of how your code becomes binary, but you do need to know that it happens, and you should understand why. A programming language is itself a piece of software: a set of instructions that transforms code written in that programming language to something that the computer can execute. If your code isn’t written just right, parts of your instructions can be lost in translation and your program will not do what you want it to do. I used to think it was silly to the point of being absurd that hundreds of lines of code would not work because I had forgotten one closing parenthesis or semicolon. Knowing that my code must be translated before being executed helped me understand; if my ...