Software program and programming

    Software programs have been there for many years now, and have advanced a lot in terms of technology, programming, designs and practices.  There are a large amount of population who are interested in learning programming and some find it difficult.  I hope programming related posts in my blog are simple to understand and are helpful in their journey of learning.

“A software program is a set of coded instructions that can be run on a computer to perform the specified operations.”

Fun software program

    Here the computer is any intelligent hardware device that reads the provided instructions and performs the requested operation.  For example, it can be a desktop computer, a laptop, a mobile phone, a tablet, an iot device, or an embedded computer processor, or a virtual hardware in the cloud, etc.

    As the technology is advancing everyday, many of the devices that we use everyday are becoming smart by embedding a computer and a software program.  For example smart TV, smart refrigerators, smart cars etc.

    The operations performed by a software program could be a compute operation on a given data, or to manage data, or to route the data over network, or to control the hardware and resources etc.  A software program is written to solve a user/business requirement and the instructions coded in the software program are aligned to perform operations as required for a given user/business needs.

    For example, an ecommerce software program has the set of instructions having logic to process the submitted shopping order request.  It takes the user order data, computes the total price of the products purchased, applies discounts, processes the payment and generates order confirmation.

  There are too many software programs in this world. There are software programs for providing ecommerce services, for generating financial report of a company, or for schools to manage the students academic records, or for game enthusiasts, or for connecting your mobile phone with your television, or for providing infrastructure service on the cloud, etc, etc, etc.

“A software program is called as a software product, if it has well defined user interface, documentation and support on how to use and workflows.”

    The software product is also interchangeably called as software or software application or simply an app.  Based on its use, different terms are used such as system software, application software, enterprise software etc.  Few examples are, Google Pay, Microsoft Word, Angry Birds game, Amazon Alexa, etc.

    More than one software that have similar user interface and integrates with each other are packaged into one bundle called Software Suite. Software Suite is generally designed in such a way that its collection of software provides a holistic experience to the user with different services offered together.  Few examples are Microsoft Office 365, Adobe Creative Cloud, VMware vCloud suite, Apple macOS etc.

    In my opinion a software program is more of a technical term, and I would use the term software program mostly in the technical documentation.

“The process of writing a sequence of coded instructions to prepare a software program is called as software programming or simply programming or coding.”

    To write a software program, you need to understand the user requirement, define the program design and translate the requirements into sequence of instructions with some logic.  You will then test written software program to verify whether the results are satisfactory, and this process is called as software testing.  There are a lot of programming practices and styles followed in the industry.

“The instructions in a software program are written in a formal language called programming language.”

    There are many programming languages with various levels of abstraction.

    A software program that will be run on a computer should have instructions in the language that the computer understands.  This is called machine language or machine code and these are binary codes. It is impractical for anyone to write big software programs in machine language.

    The assembly language is symbolic representation of machine code instructions that is human readable.  An assembler software translates the assembly language program into the machine code format that the computer understands.  These are low level languages and are very much tied to instruction set of the computer.  For example, 8051, 8086, x86, x64 assembly languages.  It is still impractical to write big software programs in low level languages. 

    To simplify writing a software program, the high level languages were developed.  The high level languages provide higher level of abstraction from machine language and uses natural language elements to simplify programming.  The software program written in high level language is translated to machine language using compiler software programs. You would then run the compiled software programs on the computer.  There are many high level languages and each have different features and styles for writing a software program.  For example, C, C++, Java, Python, C#, etc.

Software programs in different languages

    The software program that is written in any of above language is called as source code and the compiled code that runs on the computer is called as binary executable or simply binary.  The binary executable is then packaged and released to users along with documentation.  The software development methods and practices is a very vast topic to be included here.

Disclaimer:  I hope this information helps someone.  Above writing reflects my view based on my experience and learnings.  Please comment if you find any discrepancy.