From Recipes to Robots: A Beginner's Guide to Programming

Programming as a Recipe

Computer programming is really a lot like writing a recipe. If you've read a recipe, you know what the structure of a recipe is. It's got some things up at the top that are your ingredients, and below that, the directions for how to deal with those ingredients.

Well, a very similar thing happens in a computer program. You list out the various things that you're going to be dealing with, typically, and then you have some instructions that say what to do with those ingredients. So, if you can understand a recipe and follow it in your kitchen, then you can program on that level.

The Programmer as Head Chef

But you can take it a lot farther than that. Many of us, I'm sure, have seen cooking shows where a chef doesn't actually do all the work. They have what are called sous chefs, that they farm out and subdivide the jobs to, and they'll do the kind of busy work.

Programming is kind of like that, too. You are the head chef, but there are bits and pieces of the computer out there that will do things for you.

Note: It's not quite like having a human assistant. A human sous chef is fairly intelligent and knows how to coddle an egg or chop up a fish. Your computer, however, tends to be more like a bunch of really efficient robots, but they're very stupid and literal-minded robots.

So you have to, at some level, tell them exactly what to do. But once you've told them, you can just point to the robot and it'll do the same thing over and over and over again, and do it exactly the same way. Computers are like that; that's how they are valuable. They sort of take over all the boring bits of our thinking.

Programming as a Factory

You can kind of take it beyond that. Instead of just thinking of yourself as the chef that's in control, sometimes you want to program more like you're thinking about how the food actually goes through the process.

And maybe even take it up a notch and say, here's a factory that produces some food item. You have raw ingredients coming in, and they go on various conveyor belts, get chopped up in various ways, and get recombined. There's this flow of the materials through the factory, and eventually, it comes back out with some sort of a product.

Several programming languages work like that, too; they just talk about how the data runs around in the program.

For instance, consider an Excel spreadsheet: - You're putting data into little cells. - You have other cells that say, "Well, just make a little conveyor belt of these cells and add them up in this cell."

You're really doing programming, even if you think you're just writing cell macros. So that's like a little factory on your desktop there.

Advanced Concepts: Abstracting the Process

Going beyond that, there are various ways that you can get into more high-level concepts that you would learn if you were taking a computer science degree. The whole idea of programming on this level is you're saying one abstract thing, and that controls a bunch of other things.

So the next step that happens is that instead of just thinking about data as the pieces of things you're working with—strings, text, your phone numbers, whatever—you start thinking about those bits of the recipe. Those recipes can also be considered data and can be sent around on the conveyor belt in your factory.

When you start talking about actions and abstracting them, then you can start talking about doing them multiple times and looping. This action may do this action, which may do that action, which might come back and do the first thing, and you get a recursive, sort of fractal pattern.

These are the basis of the more mathematical views of programming, but you don't have to do all that at the beginning. You can just start off with the simple recipe idea, add things on as you go, and learn as you go. And then you'll do fine.