Computer Programming Concepts
What is computer programming? What do computers programmers do? What does it take to be a great computer programmer?
In 1980 a computer could process about a million small 8-bit instructions per second. In 1990 a common computer that cost $4,000 could process 400 million 16-bit instructions per second. In 2000, one could purchase a computer able to process 1,200 million 32-bit instructions per second for less than $2,000. There seems to be no limit on the amount of computing power that will be available in the future.
Department of Labor studies indicate that demand for computer literate professionals will continue to be strong. So, what do you need to know and what skills that you need?
Your goal as a computer programmer is to learn how to control a computer and make it do what you want it to do.
KEY IDEA: You must control the computer and tell it what to do. Every lesson and every activity in this class gives you the opportunity to tell a computer precisely what to do to solve some kind of problem or perform some particular function.
In the future, computers will protect themselves. They will not respond to commands that cause themselves damage. They are not fully there, yet.
In the future, computers will respond to commands that they do not now understand. They are not fully there, yet.
New commands and command languages will continue to be created. The end of this process is not yet in view.
In the future, computers will automatically search and find the information needed to solve many problems. This is the sort of problem Google is trying to solve.
Someone will have to tell the computer what to do when the automatic search fails to find the needed information. This is a job for a computer programmer.
Basic Programming Processes
- The Computation Cycle: accept input, decide what to do, execute selected process, deliver the result
- The Human Interface Cycle: select action, initiate interaction, machine action, machine outputs the results
- The Development Cycle: initiate, analyze, design, implement
- The System Life Cycle: develop, convert, operate, obsolesce
- The System Documentation Cycle
- The Project Management Cycle
- The Process Optimization Cycle: select metrics, monitor, analyze, make changes
- The Program Loop: initialize data, examine control variable, execute process if decision is to continue, return to mainline if decision is to quit
- The State Machine, semaphores and flags
- The Modeling Loop: identify entities, identify relationships, prepare the graph, validate the model
- The Programming Model: analyze the need, select the programming construct, code the instructions, simulate execution
- The Communications Loop: prepare data to be sent, send the data, verify the data, report success of failure
- The Data Retrieval Loop: analyze the data request, locate the needed data, prepare the result, deliver the result
|