Anyone Can Program: 1-Introduction

Anyone can program.  There’s a reason programmers use something called a “programming language.”  Programming is nothing more than telling the computer to do what you want in a language it understands.  Just like you can understand English, you can learn to understand  any programming language out there.  People learn new languages every day, so why can’t you?

The first step is to not be intimidated by what you might have heard about programming.  Programming code (the word used to represent stuff written in a programming language) does not look like this:

It looks like this:

print "Hello World"

Compare that to this: “La programación es fácil.” or “Программирование легко.” or even “編程容易。”

Learning a programming language is often easier than learning a different spoken language.  Every programming language out there is actually some form of english.  Like the preceding example shows, to print the words “Hello World” to the screen, you would type ‘ print “Hello World”.’  You may not understand how or why this works yet, but it’s a lot more understandable than any of the other languages I showed.

So Let’s Do It

Alright, let’s just quickly cover a few basics about what a programming language really is, then we’ll get cracking.

All computers speak a single language, called binary, which consists entirely of 0’s and 1’s. Because it can take thousands of 0’s and 1’s to write a simple sentence in computer language, programmers came up with special programming languages. These languages are understandable by humans, but can be easily translated into the computers’ native language of binary.

Of course, when I say “translated” I mean that another computer program (often called an “interpreter”) comes along and translates our programming statements. There are many different interpreters out there. All of them speak binary, but they all speak a different programming language. Let me introduce you to some of these interpreters:

Python’s a slick character and, as you can see, a big fan of white empty spaces. We’re not going to learn his native language because I can’t draw a snake very well. Perl is an interesting guy, but it’s really hard to tell what’s going on behind that shiny head of his. In fact, only those who know him well really understand what he’s saying. Ruby is really cool guy. You can tell he’s cool because he’s wearing sunglasses and he’s on a motorcycle. We’re going to learn Ruby’s language because we want to be cool like him.

So to summarize: Programming languages are easily understandable by humans and are converted into computer language (binary) by interpreters. There are many different interpreters, and each one speaks a different programming language. We’re going to learn Ruby’s language because it’s so totally awesome.

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