In reality, computers are dumber than a box of rocks. By themselves, they are nothing but a collection of wires running between electronic circuits. Fortunately, those circuits can be instructed to do certain things. Those instructions, when taken together, form computer programs. Computer programs are different from computer commands, which I describe in the previous section.
Commands are essentially individual in nature.
They allow for real-time interaction between you and the computer. Programs, on the other hand, are a collection of commands designed so the computer can execute them in a specific order. The Tower of Babel Just as computers are different, so are the languages in which they are programmed. The number of different languages used to program computers is astounding. Table 1-1 shows a sampling of the scores of different languages available.