Digital Dictionary

C

Coding¹

Nicolas Pettiaux

Collège Saint-Hubert, Auderghem, Belgium

To understand new concepts and words, there is nothing like using dictionaries and encyclopedias, and then referring to the uses. According to the famous French dictionary Le Robert, “coding is in computer science the transformation (of data) according to a code”. It is short, but coding is also a word that is increasingly fashionable. It refers of course to the source code of software, that is to say the very human words that programmers have written to, once compiled and interpreted by computers, execute the actions we want them to do.

Let us continue with Wikipedia: “The noun encoding and the verb to encode have been attested in computer science since 1969, in the sense of capturing and translating into code simultaneously, and used as antonyms of decoding or to decode”. The word coding therefore refers to encoding. The Wikipedia article goes on to provide important definitions and examples, but these are probably not the ones that are in common use today.

In the collaborative dictionary Wiktionary, it reads:

• – the process of encoding or decoding;
• – the process of writing computer software code.

Indeed, this definition facilitates the perception of the different forms of coding usually used by software (color, flashing, etc.).

It is this second meaning that is most used today. Probably in order to make programming more accessible to everyone, rather than leaving it in the hands of computer scientists, ...