The essence of programming

Programming is seen as the next step after reading and writing. So why is that?

The development of writing was essential in documenting and storing knowledge previously only tought through speech. It gave us the means of telling others what we know, without having to be in direct contact with another: we did not have to be in the place nor the same room.

So how does programming correlate to writing? First of all you need to understand what it means to program. As a programmer you instruct a computer to perform certain tasks through the use of a programming language, that is what you do, but in my opinion that is not what it means to be a programmer. To be able to tell a computer what to do, one needs to know how to do that, but foremost one need to interpretate and understand the process or part of reality that needs to be explained to a computer. In my view the essence of programming is the ability to formalise your interpretation of reality. So it is not so much about writing code, but more about interpretation, mapping and formalising reality. You could compare it to the formalisation of music through music sheets.

As writing is the means of documenting knowledge, programming is the skill of explaining it in a way that is efficient and easy to understand by both man and machine.