Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, 2nd Edition

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Coding

All computers execute machine code, but programming in machine code is like eating with a toothpick. The bites are so small and the process so laborious that dinner takes forever. Likewise, the bytes of machine code perform the tiniest and simplest imaginable computing tasks—loading a number from memory into the processor, adding it to another, storing the result back to memory—so that it’s difficult to imagine how they contribute to an entire meal.

We have at least progressed from that primitive era at the beginning of the previous chapter, when we were using switches on a control panel to enter binary data into memory. In that chapter, we discovered that we could write simple programs that let us use the keyboard ...