Here are some words and concepts that will hopefully give you a more holistic view of the more technical aspects of the industry.

Discrete, highly logical and explicit instructions that are parsed and executed by a computer.

We call this set of human-readable instructions source code, or colloquially, a computer program.

Compilers can take this source code and transform it into machine code, a representation of the source that can be executed by the computer's central processing unit or CPU.

Not all programs are compiled though, some are interpreted. The difference is that compiled languages need a step where the source code is physically transformed into machine code. However, with an interpreted language, this additional step is excluded in favor of parsing and executing the source code directly when the program is run.

All programs are composed with a collection of fundamental concepts that, when combined, can essentially dictate a wide variety of tasks a computer can perform.

Here are a collection of these most important concepts:

Typically, we can store and retrieve data in our programs by associating them with intermediary values that we call variables

We use expressions to evaluate stuff. For example, 2 + 2 is an example of an expression that will evaluate a value, namely 4.

• NOTE: typically we can use expressions and declarations in tandem to perform complex tasks. For instance, we can reference a variable we declared in an expression to help us evaluate new values which can then be stored.

Statements will use expressions and declarations to alternate a program's control flow, which is essentially the order in which declarations, expressions, and other statements are executed.

Aside from these fundamental concepts, we also talk a lot about this idea of algorithms. An algorithm is simple a series of declarations, expressions, and statements that can be used over and over again to solve well defined problems of a certain type.

For example, we can implement an algorithm that converts temperature from fahrenheit to celsius. It would look something like this:

1. Declare F = 32;
2. Expression ( F - 32 ) / 1.8;
3. Declare C = Evaluated expression from [2]

This is a form of pseudo code where we define the steps a computer program — any — computer program can take to convert fahrenheit to celsius.

The beauty of programming is that all of it revolves around the same key set of concepts and ideas. For this reason, we do not need to specify any particular programming language when discussing the functional aspects of a program.

A programming language is a series of grammar and rules that we can define towards writing source code.

Languages are effectively different approaches towards communicating the same ideas in programming. Essentially, we can communicate in say both French and English, what mainly differs is the structure of our sentences and the actual words and sounds themselves.

The same analogy can be made with programming languages.

There are many. Way too many.

Here are some of the most popular ones, though.

1. JavaScript: this language is interpreted.
2. Python: this language is interpreted.
3. Java: this language is compiled
4. Ruby: this language is interpreted.
5. C/C++: this language is compiled.

These languages all build on the same concepts defined above; the main difference lies in how they are run (compiled vs interpreted) and also how they are used.

In general, anything programmable can be programmed in each of the languages defined above. However, some languages are better suited for certain tasks above others.

For example, to perform web programming on the front-end, you'll want to write JavaScript. This is because all browsers collectively support running javascript within it's environment.

Here's a blog post from Dan Bader that outlines some data-driven reasons learning python right now can pay off -- https://dbader.org/blog/why-learn-python

Let's pseudocode a thermostat. User is able to:

• Set a temperature
• When room temp is greater than set temp, turn on heat
• Otherwise, turn off heat

Pseduocode Rock, Paper, Scissors!

Given two player inputs, p1 and p2 - where each selection can be one of: {"r", "p", "s"} - write a program that outputs the winner as:

• p1, meaning player 1 has won
• p2, meaning player 2 has won