What is coding?

Coding is the very backbone of the modern information age we live in. A facet of and often shorthand for computer programming, coding gets its name from the fact that computer programs are sets of instructions referred to as computer code. These terms are all interchangeable, so programmers are often referred to as coders.

Confusing? Let us understand the definition deeply.

“Instruct the computer”: this basically means that you provide the computer a set of instructions that are written in a language that the computer can understand. The instructions could be of various types. For example:

• Adding 2 numbers,
• Rounding off a number, etc.

Just like we humans can understand a few languages (English, Spanish, Mandarin, French, etc.), so is the case with computers. Computers understand instructions that are written in a specific syntactical form called a programming language.

“Perform various tasks”: the tasks could be simple ones like we discussed above (adding 2 numbers, rounding off a number) or complex ones which may involve a sequence of multiple instructions. For example:

• Calculating simple interest, given principal, rate and time.
• Calculating the average return on a stock over the last 5 years.

The above 2 tasks require complex calculations. They cannot usually be expressed in simple instructions like adding 2 numbers, etc.

Hence, in summary, Programming is a way to tell computers to do a specific task.

What is Programming Language?

As mentioned above, Computers understand instructions that are written in a specific syntactical form called a programming language. A programming language provides a way for a programmer to express a task so that it could be understood and executed by a computer. Some of the popular Programming languages are Python, C, C++, Java, etc.

Execute the resulting program

The computer will then execute the resulting program - this is the end product of coding. In actual day-to-day coding, though, there are additional quality control and error-correction steps. That's because the compiler will often fail to compile the code due to syntax and logic errors completely. There are also many other logic errors exposed when the compiled program is tested.