Why is it better to learn a programming language?

Most things near us are made with coding: programs for developers, robots in manufacturers, engineering analyses and strategies, and so on. In today’s world, this field has evolved into an essential piece of work, education, and recreation. 

But the programming language can be used not only for creating something complex and high-tech. Knowing the programming language, you can develop a site for cricket betting or make an application – it all depends on your skills and imagination. It can be helpful in everyday tasks, the solution of which requires monotonous actions.

What is a programming language?

It is a list of commands for a computer, the steps it performs with a specific sequence given by the programmer.

The first universally programmable device is said to be Charles Babbage’s difference machine, a mechanical device for automating calculations (1835), while the first programmer was Ada Lovelace. In 1843, the code for counting Bernoulli numbers was written on Babbage’s difference machine.

But whether Ada Lovelace is a programmer is debatable because her work was written when there was, in fact, no computer yet.

Programming languages are divided into two levels: low and high. For example, assembly language is low-level because its commands correspond to individual machine commands. Programs written in this language are extended and challenging to understand and find errors. Fortran is the first high-level programming language. Fortran made writing programs much easier because you don’t have to break them down into small machine instructions, and you don’t have to know the specific computing devices needed with low-level languages. A program created with a high-level language is more compact, easier to understand, and easier to find inaccuracies.

In the 21st century, there are many high-level programming languages, and there are already super-high-level languages. Ratings of the most popular languages have been created, but no list would list all of them.

How programming helps us

You need to find the answer to a question you are interested in on the Internet. So you open your laptop, turn it on, and it starts to boot up. The first programming product you encounter, in this case, is the operating system. According to statistics from analytics company NetMarketShare, the most common operating system is Windows. So let’s pretend that it is the one installed on your laptop. The Windows operating system is written in C, C++, and C#.

Then you open your browser. According to NetMarketShare, the most popular browser is Google Chrome, which you download. Google Chrome is written in C++.

Then you type in a question, click Search, and see that someone has made a video on your topic and posted it on YouTube. It is the video hosting site most often preferred by users (according to research firm Mediascope). It is because it’s written in the Python programming language.

But you didn’t like the blogger’s response on YouTube, so you decided to write to a friend or acquaintance on a social networking site like Facebook. These are also programming products. They are written in PHP.

Programming products help us work, relax, and learn something. If this sphere surrounds and involves modern man, we should get acquainted with it more closely and learn at least one language.

Should regular people know a programming language?

Not that it’s necessary, but it will be helpful to discover some of the steps from programming. And learn at least one language to solve problems in it. It will give you many opportunities, develop you, and teach you to navigate incomprehensibly and find a solution to this incredible. And that’s how it often happens in life. A new area arises in which you must figure out how and what to do. But a person already has a habit of finding answers to difficult questions and can take advantage of it. Such a person finds it more accessible than someone who has not solved incomprehensible problems. 

Getting to know to program and learning at least one language is worthwhile:

• For yourself. For example, knowing Excel will help you with family budgeting and reporting at work. Knowing how to create formulas will help you analyze data and make calculations. Also, programming will teach you to think structurally, to break down an enormous task into subtasks and perform them step by step, thus getting closer to the solution.
• If you have a profession. Programming skills may be needed in any work that deals with data processing, such as analysts, accountants, and entrepreneurs. They often need to program some model. For example, accountants need to make financial calculations, simulate the situation, and what will happen if the rate increases or, on the contrary, decreases. It can be done with the help of programming. It is enough to enter the parameters into a particular program and watch how and what will change. Programming can help digital artists. It isn’t easy to draw everything yourself, so for some stages, programs are used. For instance, to represent movement in a video. There are visual tools for this. So, it is possible to draw with the help of links: in the programs, create modules responsible for different parts of the image. Then they set the rule, as one of the modules will depend on the other. You can do this: when you move one module, the other moves. There can be different dependencies; for example, one of the parts moves with a delay. It makes it easier to create animation.
• If you want to become a programmer. First, get acquainted with this field and try to do something independently to understand whether you like it. If you’re going to develop further in this direction, you can, for example, attend university.

What are the benefits of programming for science?

Programming serves as an aid in this field, too. Researchers use it to create models that help test this or that hypothesis and choose the best solution. It also reduces the cost of trial and error. For example, it is better to calculate in advance a large structure (a building, a bridge) for the reliability of systems, heat losses in winter, and the passability of corridors in case of fire.

Planes and cars are rarely made as full-scale replicas to be blown in aero tubs or crash-tested. Instead, first, everything is tested on computer models, and then the final version is recreated physically. 

Proteins are modeled to help create the drug. They make geomodels: instead of drilling thousands of wells, a few are enough, and they can already be used to reconstruct the layers of rocks between the wells. Or even not to drill, but by the shape of the reflected wave after a seismic survey to calculate the structure of rocks and the location of minerals. It’s the same in materials science. Quantum process modeling has made it possible to create modern displays.

Modeling scientific processes requires specialized and often highly specialized software, which either does not exist, or there is something similar, but it is not quite the same. First, scientists must create software complexes for their tasks or modify existing ones. The second, popular in the scientific community, is the concept of open-source code, when the program can be downloaded not as executable files but in the programming language in which it was written, and make changes to it for your own needs and taking into account the specifics of your calculations.