So you want to learn C++? Awesome! Before we get started, let's look at three very important components. The Coder, the Code, and the Compiler.
The Coder
The first part of any great C++ program is the coder. The coder is me or you or anyone else who has learned how to translate great ideas into a programming language.
The Code
People are awesome and come up with really great ideas, however people have a limited amount of time and are slow when it comes to computation. Computers on the other hand, do not have great ideas, but are really great at doing repetitive computational tasks at really fast speeds. If only a person could instruct a computer to process their wonderful ideas, but how? People speak people languages (English, Spanish, French, etc...) but computers at their core are simply just an intricate design of metal processing 1's and 0's. What on Earth is a coder to do? Fortunately for us today, computers have been engineered to give us, who speak people languages, a way to break down our ideas into the appropriate set of 1's and 0's needed for computers to process our instructions. The way we do this is code. Code is essentially a file of text written by a coder. The code contains ideas that are arranged in a strategic way, so that the ideas are not only human readable, but also formatted in a sequence that can be broken down into instructions that a computer can process.
The Compiler
So far we have talked about coders and code. The coder produces the code that a computer will use to perform the coder's instructions. However, code is still not something that a computer directly understands. For this reason we need a compiler. A compiler translates code into a set of instructions that a computer can process.
Summing it up
- A coder translates ideas into code (C++)
- A compiler translates code into a format that a computer can understand.
- A computer processes the instructions it was given by the compiler.
- Awesome things happen!