From your smartphone to shopping at your local store, accessing the worldwide web or stopping at a traffic light; our world is increasingly been run by codes. Not only are they the present, they are also a huge part of the future.
It is for these reasons that you absolutely should know about it. Welcome to the world of code.
Coding 101
As with any foreign language, code is pretty much incomprehensible to those who do not know it. But with a few basic concepts, we can understand more about how it runs so much of the world around us.
Because so much code goes on behind the scenes, it’s easy to think of it as something totally out of this world. But it’s just a language, which surprisingly makes quite a lot of sense.
Take what you are reading as an example, you can look at it and from its words and visual language understand what it means, but a computer does not read like that. It needs a language it can understand –and that is the language of computer code.
The Binary Language of the Bar Code
Take any product within hand’s reach – a bottle of Coca Cola, biscuit or a pack of juice. Look thoroughly at the pack, and you will find a set of vertical white and black lines – these are called bar codes.
Because computers do not understand words, they use a different type of language, of which barcodes are a part. And this is how it works.
What looks like thick and thin lines are actually a combination of seven vertical bars – some white and some black. The white bars reflect light and are recognised as zeros. The black bars don’t reflect light as much and so these are recognised as ones.
This is a way of communicating in binary – the alphabet of computers. These seven black and white bars produce this sequence of zeros and ones, which a computer recognises as the digit five. The next set of seven black and white bars are recognised as the digit three.
Once the computer works out all the digits, it strings them together to make the 13-digit identification number. It then looks this number up in a database to find out what it is. By giving items a unique digital identity, computers right across the world can communicate with each other.
The Internet of Things
You might not realise it, but something as common as searching the web means that a computer is performing an incredibly complex task – picking through billions of web pages to find the one you are looking for. It is computer code, on your phone and in the search engine running on computers (also known as servers) that could be thousands of miles away that make this possible.
Search engines constantly keep information about the web and create a vast catalogue of human knowledge. Without indexes, it just wouldn’t be possible to find anything.
Imagine trying to find a word in a dictionary without an ordered index, an impossible task right? But because the worldwide web is indexed, words that you type on your phone are sent to the search engine for analysis.
If a word seems unusual, it checks to see if it’s a misspelling. and the search engine moves to lists of similar words that, from past experience, are more likely to be what you intended. Have you noticed that Google does this?
For each key word that you type, the search engine will look through the indexes and pull out pages that contain them. These pages are then ranked into order of relevance according to lots of factors.
The different search engines use different programs, but they all attempt to read your mind and present you with what you want. And in less than a second, what you get is a nice ordered list of the best results from billions of webpages. That is the power of computer code!
And what’s more, there’s ongoing work to connect not only computers; but every item in the world – cars, electrical appliances, smartphones, computers, network systems, any item imaginable – together. This is called the Internet of Things.
So, Where Can You Learn?
Anyone can learn coding using a smartphone for free. Consider some below:
- codecademy.com
- code.org
- uk.code.org
- khanacademy.org
- online.espresso.co.uk
So, let’s go a-coding!
