jacquesmattheij.com – what a programmer does for a living

What a programmer does for a living is best illustrated by writing a program yourself.

So, today, you’ll write your first program!

"But I don’t know how to!"

Don’t worry, you’ll manage, it is not all that hard. The program is going to be in a language called "English".

If you’re reading this, chances are that you already know English, so that will make it a bit easier than if you had to learn a new language for this. It saves us some time and in the end it will not make the program substantially different from what it would have been otherwise.

The program will be for a computer called ‘the human being’, and the goal is to get the program to produce a cup of coffee to be placed at a small table in the doorway between the kitchen and the hallway.

via jacquesmattheij.com – what a programmer does for a living. I did something similar to this when teaching an Intro to Computer Science course. In it I would attempt to do something simple like open a door and do exactly what the student’s told me to do, lots of fun and demostrated how much detail you have to provide and how little differences in language produce huge differences in the outcome.