Software

by Chris Woodford. Last updated: December 9, 2021.

A washing machine can only wash your clothes. A vacuum is great if all you need to do is suck dirt from your rug. A plane can whizz you round the world, which is pretty amazing, but that's all it can do for you. A computer, on the other hand, is a wonderful general-purpose machine that can do all kinds of things from forecasting the weather to calculating your tax return. What makes it so different? A computer is really two things in one: an electronic number-cruncher, built out of bits like transistors and memory chips, and a series of instructions that tells the electronic bits what do do. The machine is called the hardware; the instructions that operate the machine are called its software (sometimes they're also called programs, code, or apps). What exactly is software and how does it work? Let's take a closer look!

Photo: You can program a computer in all kinds of ways, from typing in commands to loading a DVD and from using punched paper tape to downloading from the web. Which method you use depends on how big and complex the program is: unless you have a fast Internet connection, it's generally quicker to load a program from a DVD than to download it. And though you might not mind typing in a few lines of JavaScript, no-one would want to type in all the code from a huge word-processing program!

What is software and why do we need it?

Imagine if your computer could do only one thing. If all it could do were basic arithmetic, it would be, quite simply, a calculator. You couldn't send emails with it, write essays, play chess, or do anything else. Thankfully, your computer is so much more: it's like a personal servant you can instruct to do whatever you want. The instructions you give a computer are called its program—and software is really just another name for that. Give your computer some new instructions and you can make it do something completely different. When you install apps on your smartphone, you are reprogramming the computer inside it to do a different job. If you know how to write programs yourself (which is called coding), you can make your own apps and get your computer to do anything you can imagine, from editing photos to playing Angry Birds.

Photo: Computer architecture: You can think of a computer as a series of layers, with the hardware at the bottom, then the BIOS, then the operating system, and finally the applications on top.

A typical computer, like the one in the laptop or smartphone you're using right now, has several main types of software inside it. Imagine them stacked on top of one another (as the picture shows here), or maybe like the layers of an onion, with the computer's electronic hardware at the core. At the lowest level is something called the BIOS (basic input/output system), which is a relatively simple bit of software (technically known as firmware), written into a computer's processor, that boots (starts up) a computer from cold. (On newer computers, there's an equivalent piece of software called the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, UEFI.) The BIOS loads another piece of software called the operating system, which carries out more sophisticated jobs, from operating the touchscreen (in a phone) to spinning the hard drive and keeping the processor cool. The BIOS and operating system are examples of what's called system software, because they work directly with the computer's hardware—the computer system, if you like.

On top of the operating system, at the next level, are what we call application programs (sometimes shortened to applications), which are things like word-processing programs and web browsers running on desktop PCs and laptops, and all the different apps you install on smartphones. Applications use the operating system to control the hardware—and you can run applications on top of applications. For example, your web browser (an application running on your operating system) can run more applications inside it written in a language called JavaScript. If you use your computer graphics program to do the same thing, over and over again, like resizing and rotating photos and saving them in a different format, you can write a little program called a macro that will repeat these processes for you so you don't have to type and click your mouse the same way each time. Or maybe you've added extra features to your web browser with "extensions," which are add-on applications that run on top of the browser.

What's so good about this layered approach? It means people who write applications don't have to come up with all the code for controlling the computer's most basic functions—things like writing information to the hard drive or figuring out how the mouse is moving; all that's done by the operating system. So any make or model of computer that can run a certain operating system should run applications written for that operating system in more or less the same way. Before operating systems were invented, programs written for one make of a computer often wouldn't run on another one, even if it was fairly similar and the code was written in exactly the same language.

Writing software—the magic of coding

How do you go about writing a computer program? Although apps have many different purposes, they all have one thing in common: they're designed to do a certain job or, you might say, solve a specific problem or problems. So the first step in writing a program is to define what those problems are and how best to tackle them.

Defining the problem

If you were writing a computer program to edit photos taken with an old-fashioned film camera, you might have a whole series of problems to solve: how to convert the photos into a digital format, how to edit them in various ways (change the brightness or contrast, or apply filters of varies kinds) to make them better, and how to save them in different sizes, formats, and so on. Each of these is really a separate problem, and some of them might involve more than one problem (how to save files in PNG format is a different problem to saving them as JPG).

Sometimes, analysing how a computer could solve an everyday problem is so complex that it's considered a completely separate job from the business of writing the final code. For example, if you were running a big, old-fashioned main-street store with no computerization of any kind and you suddenly decided you wanted to sell your products online through ecommerce, that would mean a wholesale rethinking of how you do your business. In the computer world, thinking about problems in this general, "high-level" way can be a distinct job called systems analysis (or system analysis). But it can also be done by programmers themselves—and here, we'll simply regard it as the first stage of ordinary programming.

Artwork: Complex problems: Computerizing a business with e-commerce involves carefully defining a whole series of problems, from running a website to managing stock inventory, taking payments, and organizing shipments. Each of these might involve using a completely separate computer program, which will need to work with all the other programs the business uses.

Algorithms

Once you've figured out what the various problems are, you need to figure out how you can solve each one, within the limitations of what a computer can do, using a logical series of clearly defined steps called an algorithm. Programmers often figure out their algorithms by drawing flowcharts, which are easy-to-follow diagrams with boxes and arrows that start from the top of a page and work downwards, branching off in different ways according to decisions made on the way. Another method is to use pseudo-code, which is a series of logical statements, written in plain English or a cross between English and a simple programming language, that set out the process that will eventually be transformed into a computer program. Each separate statement of pseudo-code (or an actual program) is called a line (so programmers typically talk about writing "lines of code").

Standard algorithms

Not all algorithms have to be devised from scratch: many computer programs do the same sorts of things, and bits of them are often built from algorithms other people have devised in the past. Searching and sorting are two very common things that many programs have to do—and there are standard ways of doing those that progammers can draw on. For example, a binary search (sometimes called a "binary chop") is a way of finding an item in a sorted list by repeatedly dividing it in half, while a bubble sort is a way of sorting a list into order by testing and swapping items as you move through, multiple times. Hashing (turning a variable piece of data into a smaller, compressed, fixed format) is another common problem. There are plenty of standard algorithms for searching, sorting, and hashing—so you don't need to invent your own (unless you really want to).

Artwork: A simple binary search. Suppose you want to see if a list of 16, presorted items contains the value 477. Divide the list in half and check the middle value: 212. It's less than 477, so we need to look in the other half of the list. Now keep dividing the list in half and inspecting the middle value until you find (or don't find) the item you're looking for. We reach "477" after a handful of these binary chops, which saves having to work through the list an item at a time, which usually takes a lot longer. The longer the list, the more time you save by searching this way.

Artwork: A simple bubble sort. Suppose you have a list of numbers you want to put in numeric order. Work through the list and, each time you come to a pair of numbers that are out of order, swap them around. if you carry out any swaps, you will need to work through the list again. Keep working through the list until there are no more numbers to swap—and it will then be in order.

Algorithms gone wild

The trouble with algorithms is that they're based on simplified, human assumptions about how to solve a problem. If the problem is wrongly or narrowly conceived to begin with, or an algorithm can't cope with unexpected or unusual or forms of input (known as "edge cases"), it's likely to deliver bad results. You can't really blame the algorithm itself; it's the programmers who designed it who are at fault. This explains why algorithms often make the news these days—for all the wrong reasons. How about the time Google's algorithms labeled people of color as gorillas... the time Facebook classified a famous Vietnam war photograph as unacceptable nudity... or, in Britain, when educational algorithms wrongly classified student grades? Unlike humans, algorithms aren't smart enough to stop and say "Hey, wait a minute, this is an unusual case and it doesn't fit the normal rules I use".

What are computer languages?

Once you've defined your problem and figured out your problem-solving algorithms, you can set about turning them into actual programs that your computer can implement. For that, you'll need to know one or more computer languages. People talk to one another in various languages, most of which are structured in similar ways according to the rules we call grammar. If you've written some pseudo-code, you probably wrote it in a language like English, but it won't be any good to a computer. That's because computers speak their own language, not ours. Generally speaking, computer languages are more formally structured than ordinary languages. Their "grammar" is usually called "syntax" (meaning how you structure and write your lines of code)—and it really matters; a missing comma or bracket or a stray dollar sign of slash is more than enough to bring a computer program to a halt.

High-level languages and low-level languages

At their most basic, computers "talk" in binary: everything a computer does can, ultimately, be translated into long series of zeros and ones. But it's impossible for people to think like that—our brains don't work that way—so we have to write programs in what are called high-level languages instead. These then have to be translated into something that a computer can understand. Typically that means a program has to be compiled (translated, all in one go, into computer-speak in a one-time process—the way a book is transformed into another language by a human translator) or interpreted (where the instructions you give the computer are turned into computer-speak one at a time—the way an interpreter converts someone's sentences into a foreign language). C, C++, COBOL, FORTRAN, Python, and Rust are examples of languages that are compiled; BASIC, JavaScript, Perl, PostScript, and Ruby are usually interpreted.

Screenshot: BASIC used to be the most popular high-level, interpreted language running on home computers. Today, home geeks are more likely to program in Python.

If you're writing code these days, you'll typically use a high-level language like C++, Python, Java, Javascript, React, or Ruby—or (just possibly) an older high-level language like BASIC, FORTRAN, or COBOL. These use English words like "IF", "DO", "WHILE", and so on, strung together to make logical statements. In between high-level languages and raw binary there are low-level languages called assembly language (assembler) or machine-code, which relate much more closely to how the computer itself works. In machine code, there are typically only a couple of dozen, very basic instructions, and they do simple things like moving numbers in and out of registers (memory storage "boxes"), adding one to (incrementing) registers, jumping from one line of code to another, and so on.

Why use low-level languages when high-level ones are so much easier to understand? Simply because low-level languages are easier for computers to understand, so they typically run much, much faster. Talking to a computer to a machine code is like talking to a French person in French. Talking to a computer in an interpreted, high-level language is like talking to a French person who speaks very poor English: they have to translate everything you say into French before they can understand and act on it—so it takes a lot longer.

1: LDA #$01  
2: TAX       
3: INX       
4: BRK       

Special languages

There are a few other kinds of languages you'll come across in computing, known as markup languages, that don't qualify as programming languages. The best-known examples are HTML (which is used to describe the structure and formatting of web pages), SGML (which is often used for formatting printed documents), and XML (for structuring various kinds of computer data). The HTML used to write web pages is often called "code," but it isn't the same kind as in a programming language: bracketed items like <H1>, <P>, and <IMG> just "tag" different bits of your page as headings, body text, images, or whatever so a web browser can figure out what everything means and how to display it correctly. (Confusingly, however, HTML can incorporate JavaScript, a programming language that runs in a web browser that can add interactive features to web pages or make them run as applications.)

Artwork: HTML is the "code" that makes web pages like this display correctly, but it's not a programming language.

How do programs actually work?

Whatever problems it's helping you to solve, a computer program is obviously limited to working in certain ways and it draws on four basic things that all computers do, all the time: input, processing, storage, and output. If it's a program that edits photos, its input is the photos you give it (scanned, perhaps, or fed in directly from another piece of software, such as an email program). The processing it does might include adjusting the brightness, color, or size of your photos. The output is the photos in their new form—displayed on your screen, perhaps, or shuffled off to your laser printer. And all these different steps involve storing the photos in either their original or modified form.

Whatever problems they're solving, most of what computer programs do is essentially mathematical. If you look at a few lines of a typical program, whatever language it's written in, it will usually involve storing and playing around with numbers using what is essentially algebra. Editing a digital photo involves changing the numeric values of each pixel—increasing the values to make the pixel brighter or decreasing them to make it darker. So you might have lines of code that load each pixel value, increase its value by a set amount, store the value, and then load the next pixel until you reach the end. This sort of problem solving by numerical processing explains why computers were, historically, often referred to as "number crunchers." If you look again at my little example of assembly language, you can see how just how loading, incrementing, and storing pixel values would work.

A word-processing program (like the one I'm using to write this article) doesn't look particularly mathematical as you sit at your computer and type. But how are the letters you type stored in your machine? Each letter is assigned a numeric value, so a word or sentence is really a series of numbers. When you cut some text out of one paragraph and paste it into a different one, you're really slicing a chunk of numbers from a long list and moving them higher up (or lower down the list). Suppose you have a column of words and you sort it into alphabetical order. How does that work? If you remember that each letter is really a number, it's easy to imagine the computer sorting the numbers that represent those letters (using a bubble sort or some other standard sorting algorithm).

Learning to program

If you want to learn to program for yourself, there are lots of simple ways to start. For younger children, a simple picture-based language called Scratch is a fun and easy way to get going. It involves writing simple programs that tell stories in pictures, using simple, English-like words, written on blocks, that can be moved about and slotted into place. For everyone else, Python is possibly the best high-level language to start with. It's clear, simple, relatively intuitive, and still very powerful. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, when home computers first became popular, most people would have started their programming careers with a simple, English-like language called BASIC; today, Python is generally considered a better starting point—and a better launching pad for learning about more complex languages in the future.

Screenshot: Scratch is a simple programming language that involves clicking blocks of code together to make simple cartoons and tell stories. The code I've put together on the left animates the little cat on the right.

A brief history of software and programming

Artwork: Charles Babbage (1791–1871) designed the world's first programmable, mechanical computer. Picture from The Illustrated London News, 1871, courtesy of US Library of Congress.

• 1703: Philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz rediscovers binary (0 and 1) notation, closely related to a kind of multiplication used in ancient Egypt, and imagines how its simple on/off nature could be harnessed by calculating machines.
• 1725: French Textile worker Basile Bouchon invents a loom that can be "programmed" in advance using a long paper tape punched with holes. His ideas are later improved by Jacques de Vaucanson, a pioneer of early automated "robots" called automata.
• 1804: Building on the work of Bouchon and Vaucanson, Joseph-Marie Jacquard perfects his textile weaving loom, which can be "programmed" with punched cards. Jacquard's loom is a milestone in computing history, because it shows how machines can be programmed to do the same thing over and over again.
• 1830s: Inspired by Jacquard's work, English mathematican Charles Babbage and his assistant, Ada Countess of Lovelace, develop the first programmable, mechanical computer. Lovelace imagines how it could "weave algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves."
• 1935: Alan Turing, a British mathematican and computer scientist, sets out the modern theory of how computer software operates in a landmark paper called On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.
• 1940s: German computer pioneer Konrad Zuse conceives one of the first high-level programming languages, Plankalkül.
• 1949: John Mauchly, an American computer scientist, develops Short Code, another early high-level language. Similar "autocode" languages are later developed in Britain at the universities of Manchester, Cambridge, and London during the early 1950s.
• 1954: IBM's John Backus invents the FORTRAN scientific programming language. It remains popular until the 1980s.
• 1950s: Grace Murray Hopper develops a high-level, English-like language called FLOW-MATIC that ultimately leads to the development of COBOL, the most popular business computer language in the late 20th century, in 1959.
• 1958: John Wilder Tukey, an American mathematician, is believed to have coined the use of the word "software" (meaning computer program) in a paper called "The Teaching of Concrete Mathematics" (although this has been disputed).
• 1964: BASIC is invented by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College. (The original version of BASIC is sometimes referred to as Dartmouth BASIC for this reason.)
• 1969: Charles Goldfarb develops GML (Generalized Markup Language), one of the first data-storage languages, as a way of defining how text will be printed. A more general (but much more complex) version, called SGML, follows in 1974.
• ~1970: C is developed and evolves into C++ in the 1980s.
• 1987: Larry Wall invents Perl, a high-level interpreted language, initially to help with processing large text files and reports.
• 1989: Tim Berners-Lee conceives HTML, a simple markup language, as a way of "tagging" the structure of a web page to indicate things like paragraphs and headings. With HTTP, a structured way of sending HTML and other files between a browser and server, it forms the foundation of the World Wide Web.
• 1995: Brendan Eich develops JavaScript to extend the power of "static" web pages using dynamic bits of code that run inside a web browser.
• 2003: Scratch, the introductory visual programming language, is developed at the MIT Media Lab.

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Find out more

On this website

• Computers (history)
• Computers (introduction)
• Internet
• World Wide Web (WWW)

Other websites

• Timeline of Computer History: Software and Languages from the Computer History Museum.

Books

Simple introductions

• Beginner's Step-by-Step Coding Course, DK, 2020. This book is aimed at roughly the same level as my article, and it's very web-oriented, with an introduction to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Python (with a bit of Scratch for good measure).
• Get Coding! Learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and Build a Website, App, and Game by Young Rewired State, ‎ Walker Books, 2016. The funky graphic style will really appeal to young readers.
• Coding for Beginners in Easy Steps: Basic Programming for All Ages: Coding for Beginners in Easy Steps: Basic Programming for All Ages by Mike McGrath, ‎ In Easy Steps Limited, 2015.

More complex

• Learning Python: Powerful Object-Oriented Programming by Mark Lutz, O'Reilly, 2013.

For younger readers

• Coding Games in Scratch: A Step-by-step Visual Guide to Building Your Own Computer Games by Jon Woodcock, DK, 2016.
• Coding Projects in Scratch: A Step-by-Step Visual Guide to Coding Your Own Animations, Games, Simulations, and More! by Jon Woodcock, DK, 2019.
• The Official ScratchJr Book: Help Your Kids Learn to Code by Marina Umaschi Bers, Mitchel Resnick, No Starch, 2015.

Articles

A special 1984 issue of Scientific American carried some great conceptual articles about different aspects of computer software by pioneering figures from the field, which, although decades old, are still worth reading today:

• Computer Software by Alan Kay.
• Data Structures and Algorithms by Niklaus Worth.
• Programming Languages by Lawrence G. Tesler.
• Operating systems by Peter J. Denning and Robert L. Brown.
• Computer Software for Graphics by Andries van Dam.
• Computer Software in Science and Mathematics by Stephen Wolfram.
• Computer Software for Working with Language by Terry Winograd.
• Computer Software for Information Management by Michael Lesk.