2wenty Cents

    There is growing consensus that we are indeed in the 4th industrial revolution. One of the most pervasive pillars of the contemporary industrial revolution is digital technology. So pervasive and undeniable is the impact of said technology on today's society that this era has been termed the digital age. Now, with a mass shift to and embrace of digital technology, comes a transformation of the demands of the workplace; roles that have traditionally been staples of the workplace are fast being replaced by digital equivalents of themselves. These digital equivalents are requiring less human participation - unfortunately. Driving this change are leaps that have been made in the field of computing and the dominance of the internet. The consequence has thus been that software developers are arguably becoming the most sought after professionals in many industries. Therefore, with all of the aforementioned realities in mind, how does one go about becoming a software developer tod...

  Programming languages generally fall into two categories: interpreted  and compiled . However, modern innovations and some very intelligent developers have significantly blurred the line between what can be considered an interpreted language and what can be considered a compiled language. How your computer understands code Computers only understand low level machine language; also called binary code. Binary code consists of instructions written as 1s and 0s or binary. Understanding and writing computer programs in binary isn't practical for your run-of-the-mill developer and as such, they need a high level language that is human-readable. This is where high level languages come in.  Therefore, a program is first written in a high level language. Then, a compiler or an interpreter transforms the program's high level language - which a computer does not yet understand - to low level binary code that the computer can then run. Compilers and interpreters are themselves prog...