Computer programming (often shortened to programming) is a process that leads from an original formulation of a computing problem to executable computer programs. Programming involves activities such as analysis, developing understanding, generating algorithms, verification of requirements of algorithms including their correctness and resources consumption, and implementation (commonly referred to as coding[1][2]) of algorithms in a target programming language. Source code is written in one or more programming languages (such as C, C++, C#, Java, Python, Ruby, Smalltalk, JavaScript, etc.). The purpose of programming is to find a sequence of instructions that will automate performing a specific task or solving a given problem.[citation needed] 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.
Overview
Within software engineering, programming (the implementation) is regarded as one phase in a software development process.
There is an ongoing debate on the extent to which the writing of programs is an art form, a craft, or an engineering discipline.[3] In general, good programming is considered to be the measured application of all three, with the goal of producing an efficient and evolvable software solution (the criteria for "efficient" and "evolvable" vary considerably). The discipline differs from many other technical professions in that programmers, in general, do not need to be licensed or pass any standardized (or governmentally regulated) certification tests in order to call themselves "programmers" or even "software engineers." Because the discipline covers many areas, which may or may not include critical applications, it is debatable whether licensing is required for the profession as a whole. In most cases, the discipline is self-governed by the entities which require the programming, and sometimes very strict environments are defined (e.g. United States Air Force use of AdaCore and security clearance). However, representing oneself as a "professional software engineer" without a license from an accredited institution is illegal in many parts of the world.
Another ongoing debate is the extent to which the programming language used in writing computer programs affects the form that the final program takes.[citation needed] This debate is analogous to that surrounding the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis[4] in linguistics and cognitive science, which postulates that a particular spoken language's nature influences the habitual thought of its speakers. Different language patterns yield different patterns of thought. This idea challenges the possibility of representing the world perfectly with language, because it acknowledges that the mechanisms of any language condition the thoughts of its speaker community.
