UNDERSTANDING THE HOLISTIC CONCEPT OF COMPUTER PROGRAMMING || PYTHON PROGRAMMING || STEEM GROWTH || SKILLSET

Hello everyone, welcome to another week of learning Journey in programming with the Python Programming Language.
This week, we will be looking at:

• understanding the holistic concept of computer programming
• analogy for deeper understanding
• why you see what you see on your screen

Oftentimes, many people feel extremely happy learning new skills and ideas. They can forego anything at that present moment. They get so motivated at the start but when the difficulty level associated with that skill set increases, their passion starts taking a downward slide. From my experience over the years, especially while starting as a beginner, learning and practicing a computer programming language can be a bit daisy. If you really want to gain mastery of it, your passion must increase steadily as difficulty levels increase. Please take every learning topic and phase seriously. As you progress, please take it easy with yourself, learn and understand one concept at a time. Try to grab the idea behind a particular concept before moving on to another one and lastly, like I'll always say, PRACTICALITY will always beat PURITY

Theories are the building blocks of any skill and you just have to understand concepts but they ain't enough to make you an expert. **PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE!!!”. I'll try my best to be simple in my words and I'll also try not to make any topic overwhelming. However, DON'T fold your arms and wait for Practicals when you've got no ideas of how things work from the theoretical standpoint, you'll surely float when we start getting our hands dirty writing program scripts. So take your time slowly and easily as we will be writing more Python codes starting from the next two series from now. My goal is to get you to understand all the basic concepts first before the coding part.

If this makes sense to you, goodluck and stay safe.

The concept of programming is a broad and holistic term which cuts across all works of life including our personal lives. You see, I'll always tell people, NEVER say I'm not a programmer because in our everyday existence, we've planned, ordered our plans and executed them. Some of us have also taken it up one step further by reviewing our daily targets. This automatically makes everyone a programmer. But then, programming has different dimensions so maybe if you tell me I'm not a computer programmer, I could understand as you've been more specific. But wait a minute, what then is programming?

From my end, I'll define PROGRAMMING as the sequential process of PLANING, ORDERING and EXECUTING specific events in order to solve a particular problem.

I just highlighted 3 important points preceded by the word SEQUENTIAL

• PLANNING
• ORDERING and
• EXECUTION

The goal of every program is to solve a particular problem and this can be done by planning for the event, ordering the plans and lastly executing the plans. A well executed plan meets the intended goal.

However, going by the definition, if any of the steps ain't met or sequence of operation is altered for the other, NO programming is done and as a result, expected result lost.

SCENARIO 1:
Let's say on a particular working day, you needed to:

1. make breakfast for your family
2. drop your kids in school
3. tidy up work file at the office
4. make lunch
5. pick your kids from school and lastly
6. market your products s online and lastly
7. help your kids with their assignments

This is a well outlined plan but wait a minute, will you achieve your daily target if you choose to start with marketing your products online when you're supposed to take your kids to school? OR perhaps take your kids to school and head for the market when you're supposed to be at the office. OR perhaps execute pan 1 to 5, skip plan 6 and finish with 7. Yes you may have executed 99.9% of all your plans but because you skipped, or unordered any of the plans, your goal for that day was defeated. So Programing preaches planning, ordering and 100% execution of plans in sequence. You just have to grab this. Image incorporating this into your personal life but this isn't a motivational speech anyways.

SCENARIO 2:
Let's also take a closer look at the functionalities of our sense organs. Let's go biological. So basically, there are 5 sense organs

• Eye
• Nose
• Ear
• Skin and
• Tongue

These sense organs are programmed to perform a particular activity and in order to meet their respective goals, none overlaps or takes up the function of another. The eye is for sight and for sight alone; the nose for smell and smell alone. So you see, first, they are events that were planned and automatically allowed to execute specific functions.

SCENARIO 3:
Another scenario is the inhalation and exhalation process every human system undergoes to stay alive.

You'll agree with me that these processes function in their unique manner, the goal for which is to take in air needed to stay alive. The execution plan is first and first, take in air in the form of oxygen (inhalation) and give off air in the form of carbon iv oxide (exhalation)

You cannot exhale before inhaling and even if you think it's possible, trust me, you had first inhaled before exhaling. The ideology still remains, it was planned, ordered and allowed to execute so as to meet a particular goal; the art of programming.

From the 3 scenarios explained, I guess you grap at a glance the overall ideology behind the entire concept of programming.

Computer systems are the dummest things you can ever think of. Yes I said so. As a matter of fact, no one computer system in the world can ever perform any task on its own without instructions being given to it. Imagine you want to send a text message to your friend with your mobile phone. Expecting your mobile phone to do that on its own will never happen. For you to get that message delivered, you'll have to type in the text and hit the send button right?

From the computing stand point, you see, every computer system understands one and only one language which is called binary or machine language. These are basically programs written in zeros and ones. So this is what happens when you type in texts on your device and see results in the form of outputs, behind the scenes, when we make any input to our systems, every single word typed in is converted to zeros and ones respectively, remember the binary language the system understands? After the conversion, because your input has been conververted into the language your device understands, it then sends back the feedback as expected information. Without a base language on your device, you'll never be able to type in a single word onto your device, play games, make calls or perform any device related activity.

For the purpose of this learning Journey, please note that the word “computer system” is any device that can accept input, process it and give back feedback in the form of data. So anything (e.g your smartphone) that can allow you to send in data for processing while you wait on the other side for expected information is actually a computer device.

For now, do not try to ponder much on this, it's a concept we will deliberate more on later. Just understand that the reason why you see any data on your screen is because there's a base language in every device called machine language, the only language a computer system understands.

We have been able to look into the holistic ideology behind the workings of computer programming languages, different scenarios to explain the analogy of the concept of programming and why we see what we see on our devices. Hope you understood every part of our learning today.

In the next phase of our learning Journey, we will be looking at part 2 of this series. In that series, we will be looking into the what, why, when and how of computer programming languages, roles and qualities of a computer programmer and the activities of a programmer in solving any single problem.

Please feel free to ask questions, drop comments, suggestions and ways of improvement. I'll be available to jog all of them. For now, please take it easy, be serious with your learning, keep learning, ask questions, research and stay happy.

Much love from;
BIG SAM

Take out a pen and paper, write out 3 programs you'll love to build after learning the Python programming language. Be sure it's something you'll be proud you developed after completing the overall learning Journey. It should be submitted on or before 12pm on Saturday. CHEERS

Special thanks goes to:
@steemkidss @bossj23 @goodybest @ngoenyi @patjewell @gunthertopp @yakspeace