Where do instructions come from?

Where do these instructions come from? What does the processor do with them?

These instructions come from various applications running on your computer. Applications such as video games, browsers, music players, email, and zoom contain millions of instructions in them.

When you run one of these applications, the processor uses various other components inside your computer to bring the instructions embedded in the application to life. This results in everything you see, hear, and experience on the computer, whether it’s watching a YouTube video, listening to music, surfing the web, emailing a friend, doing a zoom call with your family, or reading your favorite Bitsy Bytesy lesson.

Let’s draw this out:

With that background, we are now ready to define the terms code and coding.

Code is a collection of one or more instructions.

Coding is the activity of putting together step-by-step instructions to solve a problem.

Here’s an appetizing analogy to help you understand this better.

A coder is like a baker or a chef who cooks up a program with instructions as ingredients.

We will use the terms coding and programming interchangeably because they both mean the same. The same goes for the coder and programmer. Code, program, and application are all synonyms too.