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We can now accomplish some pretty incredible things with technology. What had once seemed wildly futuristic is now becoming reality.
Say, for example, you wanted to develop a smart home system that would open and close your windows when certain conditions were present. You would need to equip your windows with temperature and moisture sensors and then go about programming the system, so the windows would adjust according to the weather. However, simply telling the system to open the windows when it’s pleasantly warm and close the windows when it’s raining heavily wouldn’t work. These instructions leave far too much open to interpretation. The system would need very specific input, such as temperature thresholds, exact moisture levels, etc., to perform properly. The same goes for any programmed system.
When looking at modern applications, systems and capabilities, it’s hard to believe that to work properly, all the programming that goes into them still has to be rendered into bits and bytes composed into strings of binary code. From the coolest looking smartphone app, to the most sophisticated enterprise software, and even what seem like futuristic technologies, such as smart home features and autonomous vehicles — all require their instructions to be delivered in binary.
Why is this? Computers don’t work well with ambiguity and nuance. Binary provides the completely unambiguous instructions of either “off” (zero) or “on” (one). They use these simple binary states as the basis for logical computations, which render the computer’s circuits as either “on” or “off.” These simple circuits are used to create logic gates (for example, AND, OR, and NOT), which allow the programmer to create operations and manipulate data in a variety of ways. This is then duplicated billions of times to create modern CPUs.
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This kind of unambiguous input is created with a system that offers only two options: yes or no, on or off, one or zero. Though, just because the final input has to be configured in a way that allows the machine to process it doesn’t mean that we as humans have to completely adapt to the machine’s way of “thinking.” If we were forced to enter instructions only in binary formats, programming would be incredibly tedious, and the science and practice of computing may never have reached the level we see today.
What is abstraction in programming?
Abstraction, in a programming context, aims to hide as much complexity as possible to allow programmers to focus on what’s most important and relevant. Abstraction is used to camouflage much of what is vital to making a program work, but is innately complex due to machines’ requirements for binary input. Hiding the complexity, however, should not in