Programming work is often unknown to the vast majority of non-technical people. It makes me laugh when people refer to developers affectionately as “the ones who spend all day with ones and zeros.” The truth is, in all the years I’ve worked in the industry, I have never dealt with binary code directly. What I have done, however, is show people that pieces of code can be rather simple in essence and seemingly logical instead of being a dark art form.

When it comes down to it, programming is telling a computer how to run an orderly series of actions (algorithm) to obtain a result. It can be said in many different ways, which are known as programming languages. There are languages that are more oriented toward a specific task such as querying a database, while others are more general and can be used to develop virtually anything imaginable.

Over the course of a career, it’s not unusual for someone to learn several languages throughout their professional life. In my case, I’m clocking in at around ten after a quick count. Learning the syntax of a language takes relatively little time since there are many similarities between them. However, simply knowing a lot of languages does not necessarily mean that you’re a good programmer. Since programming is a creative process there are an infinite number of ways to solve the same problem. It is how the programmer chooses to solve the particular problem that truly reflects the extent of their skills.

To illustrate this idea, I will present a simple example without going into technical details and saving me some complexities beyond the problem itself to show how important it is to have some knowledge of what is being developed before you begin to throw around lines as a fool to throw of code.

The Challenge:
Four programmers, each with different levels of experience, will create an algorithm tha can identify prime numbers (a prime number is an integer that is only divisible by one and itself).

To show the differences between each of these, let’s use the number 999,529:

• The first programmer, inexperienced and somewhat unconsciously, decides to use an algorithm that checks every one of the integers between 2 and 999,528 to see if any of these are factors of the number tested. It checks the 2, 3, 4.and so on until the end. At first glance it looks to be a highly inefficient algorithm, but it works.
• The second programmer, equally inexperienced but with more intelligence, realizes that if the number is odd, there is no need to check the even numbers to see if a number is prime. This new algorithm will just check the 3, 5, 7, 9, and so on until the end. As this program only checks half of the numbers as the first program, it is twice as fast. It is still inefficient, though less than before, but still works.
• The third developer already has some experience and knowledge from the second controller and knows that for over half of the numbers analyzed there can never be a factor of itself so just check the 3, 5, 7, … and so on 499 763. As in the previous case, the same result has been obtained by performing half the operations. Yet there remains much  room for improvement.
• The fourth developer, an expert and skilled mathematician,  knows from studying one of the properties of prime numbers that beyond the square root of a number, there is no integer factor that divides. Building on the knowledge of all previous programmers, the new program is an algorithm that only checks odd numbers to 999. This makes the program about 2,000 times faster than the first, and only consists of two lines of code.
• There are more ways to optimize the program,, but for this particular example, these cases are more than sufficient.

In all four cases, the developers used the same programming language and had the same programming skills, but did not share the same mathematical knowledge. And for the record – yes, everyone has got the same result (the number is prime, but the difference between them is obvious).

This example in itself is fairly trivial but is still applicable for a variety of situations in the world of programming: programs that needlessly use more memory than necessary, conducting database queries without optimizing first, the constant processing elements that do not vary during a certain time period, and so on, and so on.

Conclusion: Programming is something that almost anyone can do with a little curiosity, but creating optimal schedules is something that requires knowledge and dedication.

Tags: Programming

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