This post is the result of my attempt to better understand software systems. And this is just an inception.

Guidelines

Answers to all these questions have something in common:

• Why do we experience any sort of errors during software production or execution?
• Why should we write configuration files in a particular way?
• Why the frameworks(that are born to assist the software development) influence our style of programming?

Let us consider that you want to accomplish something, Knowing ‘clearly’ what you wanted. And you know who can help. Then you need to know how to communicate your need.
The crucial part is how you are going to communicate your need.

If it is a computer that you are trying to communicate with, you are expected to follow some guidelines to be understood properly. Those guidelines are everything for computers. So those guidelines need to be properly designed, understood and used.

All of the software that I know has concrete guidelines to communicate with them.

And we are expected to follow the guidelines.

So, all the of the answers to the above questions have guidelines in common.

Different varieties of perceiving

And now we’ll try to answer below questions.

• How the data is interpreted?
• How come we have these many varieties of data and file types.

What can be understood by looking at the extension of the file is that it defines how to generate such a file and read it. A video/audio file can’t be opened by a text editor. Because the text editor is designed to understand and generate a plain text file. And the VLC media player can be used to generate and play media files. File Formats is the magic. We use file format specification to generate and read files. That is the reason for every file format we have a different software.

The file format specification is a happy handshake between encoder and decoder.

We have different file formats for different types of files like text, video, image etc. Or same type of file with some added guidelines like .html, .py etc.

The file format specification is the guidelines here. But the point I’m trying to make here is that even though the data is stored in bits, it is perceived differently.

For example most of the programs expect arguements in string format. Those arguments are stored in an understood location. In the program we take those arguments and even change the type of data in those arguments to accommodate required operations. We have many examples for this.