“People confuse programming with coding. Coding is to programming what typing is to writing.” - Leslie Lamport
Programming and coding are two different things, even though they’re terms often used interchangeably.
Coding is the act of typing out code, usually in a popular language such as Python or Javascript.
Programming is the act of problem solving. It involves thinking, forming the steps you’re going to take to solve a problem in a way that a computer can understand.
Put another way, it’s the difference between writing well and typing. Typing is a skill that lets you formulate words using a typewriter or keyboard. You learn the layout, where each key needs to be pressed to form words.
Leslie Lamport revolutionized how computers talk to each other. The Turing Award-winning computer scientist pioneered the field of distributed systems, where multiple components on different networks coordinate to achieve a common objective. (Internet searches, cloud computing and artificial intelligence all involve orchestrating legions of powerful computing machines to work together.) In the early 1980s, Lamport also created LaTeX, a document preparation system that provides sophisticated ways to typeset complex formulas and format scientific documents.
Thinking outside the box of code with Leslie Lamport (Changelog Interviews #552) |> Changelog podcast
