Exciting your orbitals

“So why programming, what is it really?”

Programming is writing instructions for how parts make a whole.  Take, for instance, legos.  Remember getting legos for your birthday?  Did you read the instructions or just start building?  To build the lego Millennium Falcon you must assemble thousands of parts according to the blueprint.

“Legos are fun, but what do they have to do with programming?”

You program everyday without even knowing it.  When’s the last time you had a really hard question?  How did you solve it?  The first thing you did was to re-examine the question to understand it better; you looked for clues.  Then you went through each part and determined what it did.  At this point you could have written a little story detailing the parts and how they fit together.  This story is a lego model for your question, it is a program.

Programs give us answers by modeling a problem or task.  When we were little kids how did we accomplish stealing a cookie?  The cookie jar was too high so we had to find a chair.  So, to get a cookie we needed to find a chair, move it into place, and then grab a cookie.  There.  I’ve tricked you.  We’ve just written a program that simulates ruining our dinner.

“Sounds too easy, what’s the catch”

Well, programming can be complicated, thats why its called writing code.  But programming is no more complicated than a piece of art.  Programs are acts of creative expression, having structure and a sense of aesthetic just like a haiku, a sonata, or a painting. Each line of code expresses an idea and draws from a variety of metaphors and idioms.  Its like flying at the speed of thought.  This is what it feels like to program.  Pretty cool huh.