Introduction
Computer programming is the process of designing and building an executable computer program to accomplish a specific computing result or to perform a specific task. Programming involves tasks such as: analysis, generating algorithms, profiling algorithms' accuracy and resource consumption, and the implementation of algorithms in a chosen programming language (commonly referred to as coding). The source code of a program is written in one or more languages that are intelligible to programmers, rather than machine code, which is directly executed by the central processing unit. The purpose of programming is to find a sequence of instructions that will automate the performance of a task (which can be as complex as an operating system) on a computer, often for solving a given problem. Proficient programming thus often requires expertise in several different subjects, including knowledge of the application domain, specialized algorithms, and formal logic.
Tasks accompanying and related to programming include: testing, debugging, source code maintenance, implementation of build systems, and management of derived artifacts, such as the machine code of computer programs. These might be considered part of the programming process, but often the term software development is used for this larger process with the term programming, implementation, or coding reserved for the actual writing of code. Software engineering combines engineering techniques with software development practices. Reverse engineering is a related process used by designers, analysts and programmers to understand and re-create/re-implement. (Full article...)
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Did you know?
- ... that upon release, SpellForce 3 was so buggy that the developer had to release 21 patches in 14 days?
- ... that Rui Pinto uncovered four terabytes of confidential information about association football finances despite having no formal education in computer science?
- ... that Kathleen Hall Jamieson, author of Cyberwar, thinks it "highly probable" that Russia changed the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election?
- ... that Xia Peisu, the "mother of computer science" in China, and her husband Yang Liming, who helped explain magic numbers, were elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences at the same time?
- ... that the 1994 film Fresh Kill is noted for its influence on hacker subculture, with a 1995 article about the film containing one of the first recorded uses of the term "hacktivism"?
- ... that the Toronto-based Human Computing Resources was a pioneer in the commercialization of the Unix operating system?
Computer programming news
- 11 January 2021 – Aftermath of the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol
- The Parler social networking service goes offline after Amazon discontinued providing cloud computing services. The company's chief executive said that the service will be down "longer than expected" as "most people with enough servers to host us have shut their doors to us." (CNBC)
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