It is very likely that whoever landed on this page doesn’t need the first few paragraphs, but bear with me a second, because I am at a point where I really think that we need to go back to where it all started.
Programming languages are tools developed in order to tell computers what we want them to do for us. More precisely, they are tools developed to speed up the process of telling a computer what to do. It is called “computer software“, or, for brevity, just “software“.
In order to use those languages, we rely on someone writing translators from the programming language we are using to the set of instructions that a processor can actually execute. This is because the different processors’ sets of instructions are in the vast majority of cases considered too primitive to be used in the production of usable software needed to be delivered within an acceptable time frame.
However, programming languages are still considered too technical by the vast majority of the population who can benefit from the use of computer software and for this reason there’s a community of technicians working to interpret the desires for computer programs coming from the population at large. Those technicians write sequences of orders to computer (kind of “speeches“) in those languages, also called “computer programs“, to satisfy the needs arisen from the rest of the community. It should also be discussed how those “needs” are created, but this might be a subject for another discussion.
So, here we are. In any software production activity we have three entities
- Computers
- Technicians
- Customers
Customers want Computers to do something for them, but only Technicians can tell Computers what to do.
And here is where the problems begin.
