Computer programming

Computer programming (often shortened to programming) is a process that leads from an original formulation of a computing problem to executable programs.
It involves activities such as analysis, understanding, and generically solving such problems resulting in an algorithm, verification of requirements of the algorithm including its correctness and its resource consumption, implementation (commonly referred to as coding^[1][2]) of the algorithm in a target programming language. Source code is written in one or more programming languages (such as C, C++, C#, Java, Python, Smalltalk, JavaScript, etc.). The purpose of programming is to find a sequence of instructions that will automate performing a specific task or solve a given problem. The process of programming thus often requires expertise in many different subjects, including knowledge of the application domain, specialized algorithms and formal logic.
Related tasks include testing, debugging, and maintaining the source code, implementation of the build system, and management of derived artifacts such as 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 source code. Software engineering combines engineering techniques with software development practices.
Computer programming is the craft of writing useful, maintainable, and extensible source code which can be interpreted or compiled by a computing system to perform a meaningful task. Programming a computer can be performed in one of numerous languages, ranging from a higher-level language to writing directly in low-level machine code (that is, code that more directly controls the specifics of the computer’s hardware) all the way down to writing microcode (which does directly control the electronics in the computer).
Using programming languages and markup languages (such as XHTML and XForms) require some of the same skills, but using markup languages is generally not considered “programming.” Nevertheless, many markup languages allow inclusion of scripts, e.g. many HTML documents contain JavaScript. There are exceptions where markup languages do represent programming such as SuperX++
Computer programming is one part of a much larger discipline known as software engineering, which includes several different aspects of making software including design, construction and quality control. The subject of this book is software construction, that is, programming. Computer programming is also a useful skill (though not always necessary) for people who are interested in computer science. Whereas software engineering is interested specifically in making software, computer science tends to be oriented towards more theoretical or mathematical problems.