Learning to Program

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Each new innovation and breakthrough builds on the last one. Program code used to be a bunch of holes in a stack of punch cards. You had to be able to write instructions in binary (and you had to keep your punch cards in order). One misplaced punch, and your entire program could fail. Eventually, programmers were able to write code in assembly, which is still really hard to understand, but is much easier than using 1’s and 0’s. The assembly code was translated to 1’s and 0’s. Then other languages were developed that are (relatively) easy to write and understand. You can write instructions in English, and other code magically converts your code into binary so the computer will understand it.

One of the most ...