DEV Community

Sadick
Sadick

Posted on • Updated on

Programming revolves around these 3 things

Photo by Christopher Robin Ebbinghaus on Unsplash
When you think about programming you often feel that there is a lot more in that space. But if you look at it carefully programming revolves around these 3 things.

Input

Input involves getting data from some source. It might sensors, keyboard or any source. You might have a program that gets user input via a keyboard and another one that gets data via a file or URL. For your program to be useful you must provide it some data to work on (from any source).

Processing

Once data is in your program you have to process it in a meaningful way to solve your problem. The processing may involve, doing some arithmetic, making decisions based on certain conditions and looping through some things and performing actions on them.

Output

After the processing on the data you expect your program to give you some kind of feedback. That feedback is what output is. It might give the feedback by displaying something on your monitor or by performing another visible action like maybe shutting down a computer or moving the arm of a robot.The feedback you get is dependent on what you want to achieve.

Top comments (5)

Collapse
 
kayis profile image
K • Edited

The sad part is, every of these three points can fill a lifetime to learn inside out :D

But, yes, I always tell people, there are no side-effects, you just have to choose your unit of work big enough.

I think for the front-end, Cycle.js has it nailed down.

Collapse
 
sadick profile image
Sadick

I agree, getting those three things right takes time. I havn't had time to checkout Cyclejs though.

Collapse
 
amdn profile image
Arturo Martín-de-Nicolás

It's a nit, but the title should be "Programming revolves around these 3 things"... these not this.

Collapse
 
sadick profile image
Sadick

Thanks

Collapse
 
_famba profile image
Mawande • Edited

The actual program revolves around 3 things: Selection, sequence and iteration.