Chapter 22. Designing Your Own Programs

Every program starts off with a problem. Typically the best problems for computers to solve involve something that humans find tedious, tiresome, or error-prone to do themselves. For example, people used to calculate formulas by hand. If they made one mistake, any formulas relying on the flawed data would calculate incorrect answers. To make calculating multiple formulas faster and more accurate, programmers invented the spreadsheet.

The invention of the spreadsheet provided a general-purpose tool that a wide variety of people could use, from business executives calculating financial results to engineers calculating scientific results. However, programs can also solve more specific types of problems.

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