Lesson Journey from Microsoft's Web Dev for Beginners
This post is my notes from individual lesson of Microsoft’s Web Dev for Beginners learning course.
Does the idea of “giving instructions to computers” make sense to you now?
I have prior knowledge about programming so the idea of giving instructions to computers did make sense easily. In fact, I was an informatics teacher who taught this exact idea to students.
Human use languages, and so do the computers. But, the two speak different languages and yet we still have to interact with each others. This is where programming language come into play.
Programming language bridges between human and computers. What so different between human and computer languages, anyway? Well, computers only understand 0s and 1s. The don’t understand human language, heck they don’t even understand what I’m writing now.
In a way, computers are just like human. They will do whatever thing that we asked them to. Say, you asked your friend to take the pen on the table, and your friend asked again “which pen? there are a lot of pens here with different colors”. So you tell your friend that you need the “red pen” that is the shortest among the pens there, not the tallest, not the middle, only the shortest one. That is quite a detailed instruction, no? Your friend understand it and brought you the pen you needed.
If we change this friend with a computer as well as the environment, we ask the same kind of instruction. Say you asked the computer to take a file named “exercise1.docx” but you have files named “exercise1.docx” all over your folders. You need to specify with incredible detail of the location of the file. Let’s say that you want to take the one inside the /school/geography/exercises/ folder.
The difference between our friend and computer is that our friend can ask again to us for confirmation, reconfirmation, etc. if something is amiss. But our computer will do exactly what we told them to even though our instruction is false.
Can you think of a daily task you’d like to automate with programming?
There are a lot of daily task that I would like to automate.
What questions are bubbling up in your mind about this whole programming thing?
Well, why are there so many programming languages? Why not use one, single programming language for all?
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