To those following the series, sorry for being late. It was the last week of the term (AKA Hell week) and I had tons of to-do on my list that I didn’t remember to post Part II of the programming series. Also, I tried to apply a box model under the <code> tag using CSS but sorely failed.

If anyone can show me how to do it right, it’d be greatly appreciated.

Again apologies.

For Week One, we’ve established that programming is nothing more than issuing step-by-step instructions that tells a computer waht to do. Computers are stupid, they need exact instructions to function making programming so time consuming.

How do you tell a computer what to do? Computers don’t understand words, which is why people must write instructions for a computer by using a special or programming language.

A collection of instructions that tell the computer what to do is known as a program. The instructions, written in a specific programming language, is known as the source code.

What Language is the best?

Unlike other standards where it’s easy to pick one as the Cream of the Crop, it’s quite hard to pick and stick to a single language altogether. Many of them serves a specific purpose, like micro-controller assembly, while others serve multiple purposes. It’s basically a preference thing when it comes to picking out your native language.

Because a computer’s processor is made of millions of transistors, they are limited to a language that consists of 1’s and 0’s, which is known as machine language. Here’s an example:

0011 1100 1010 1111

0101 0110 1101 0101

Did you understand what it meant? I know I didn’t. Programming in machine language is prone to mistakes and creating programs takes a much longer time. For example, if you wanted to display a “Hello sylv3rblade” message in ruby, you only need to type:

puts("sylv3rblade!")

And press enter. If you wanted to do the same for machine language, you could end up with one hundred lines of codes and still be far from displaying the letter “W.”

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