What is it ?
A computer program is a collection of instructions that performs a specific task when executed by a computer. A computer requires programs to function, and typically executes the program’s instructions in a central processing unit. – Wikipedia
Confused? Alright, a program can simply said as a application in our computer, smartphone which has icon and can do something when we pressed on it.
The world itself is very wide, don’t you mind how your television remote works? how your calculator works? how your chatting application works? and even how google works !? All of it is because of program inside the computer , wait, what is computer, is calculator a computer ? In this case, AC/television’s remote also a computer since it consume electricity and can do something when we give input on it.
How to make it ?
A program nowadays built by using one or more programming language called code. Later the code that written by human, understandable by human converted into machine language that can be read easily by machine or CPU (I’m not say that machine language couldn’t be read by human :p). The converting process called compiling. The compiling process also can be done before the program initialized or at the run time of program run.
There’s a lot of programming language and every of them has its capability. For a server, web service, website, PC application, smartphone application we can use some of high level programming language like objective C, java, PHP, ruby. For a small device like remote, television, router, modem which basically has single specific function and use small battery would use lower level programming language like C/C++.
Example
The television remote will always scanning, waiting for button pressed, and every single button has it’s ID and each ID has corresponding Signal Output that would be sent to television. And so with television, it will always waiting for a signal that come from remote 24/7
A smartphone application would be programmed to do the job based on every single input user give to it, for example the animation, the coloring, the font size, even drawing a line is programmed by programmer.
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