A different perspective of contemporary programming

Nowadays, programming is not that hard as it was earlier. Moreover, a programmer need not have a formal background in programming, though, it often depends on the problem. We can classify the problems broadly as End User Applications, Systems Programs, and Infrastructural Software etc.

High level constructs, efficient libraries, proper standardization are some of the reasons why programming in most of the cases seems simple. Sometimes it seems to me whether we really are programming a computer or not? We are not directly giving instructions to a computer, we are instructing the high level constructs available, with languages. Those constructs -printf, scanf etc. to name a few - hide most or almost all of the complexity and instruct the computer (generating instructions that are in one to one correspondence with computer’s instructions set). But this process is not as easy as it seems. We have to pass through many of such constructs. For example, one construct may use another and so on. These transform our high level - often very high level - source code to computer instructions: compiler/interpreter, pre-defined libraries, standard libraries, system calls and assembler.

As end programmers, we are enjoying the compiler technology that features us with high level constructs. If you are a Python programmer, you can use those easy to use data-types it provides with a single Python instruction. Like

data = list()    
data.append("hello")
data.append(23)

We should not think these are to be understood by the computer (bare machine). These are understood by intermediate systems and they modify them such that the computer can understand. We are just programming (instructing) the constructs, intermediate systems. My intention is not that one has to go for low-level programming but as mentioned, it is a different perspective of modern programming.

If you want to enjoy knowing the difficulties in building those constructs, you can revolutionize.