| Maybe we should differentiate the essence of programming from the essence of software development: Software development, in my understanding, is about designing and implementing tools to solve particular (classes of) problems. Exactly what is being described in the article. I think Programming in general is about writing instructions that (maybe not only) a computer can execute to produce (the desired) effects. These instructions may or may not involve input data and may produce side-effects along the way and may not even produce output data (although one could say that “nothing” itself is data similar to how we use 0 as a number). I don’t think that we need a purpose for writing programs. We can program just about any nonsense and we don’t even have to ever execute it. I think “problem solving” is already too specific. Even though it makes a lot of sense to think about programs as mathematical functions that transform data, underneath our abstractions are building instructions for the computer to execute and they tend to produce the desired output if we are doing it right and there are no interfering environmental circumstances. A simple substitution of input data with output data would be the most primitive example, although it would be trivial. To produce non-trivial outputs, we need to replace the substitution with a (more complex) algorithm. Algorithms are tools that solve particular (classes of) problems. So here we are, doing software development, because we actually need a tool. |