Programming: What is software?

Computers are exciting things. You can do a lot with them, from writing a paper to creating a multimedia presentation. However, we forget that computers are just electronic equipment. They aren't created knowing a gif from a jpeg. That's where programmers come in. Computers understand things in binary, a numeric system made up of only zeroes and ones. In binary, the pattern 101 is equal to 5. Computers have to use binary because it is made up of electronic circuits. These circuits only have states of on and off, hence zeores and ones represent on and off states. With this, patterns of zeroes and ones are used to communicate such things as letters to the computer. So capital 'A' might be read as the number 65 by the computer, which is translated into binary. From this simple concept, present day computers were born.

Software helps us talk to our computers and get meaningful actions from them. Without software, you'd have to flicker switches on and off like morse code to do anything. Abstraction is the concept of how far removed software allows you from the computer's complexity. Low level languages like assembly are processed quickly by computers, but are hard to program in because the code is closer to the hardware and makes little sense to humans. High level programs like Java and C# are more user friendly but require more work by the computer to translate commands into machine language, and thus is processed slower.

So software is good because it is the communication piece between you and your computer.