Programming, also known as coding or software development, is the process of creating an application to perform a particular set of functions. Another way of saying it is that it’s a way of telling a computer to perform various tasks. This is done with what are known as programming languages, which, much like a spoken language, contains words and phrases that mean certain things to certain people (that understand the language). In this case, they are understood by the computer.
However, programming languages contain words, and, in the end, it needs to be understood by the computer’s hardware - which understand a special language called machine code. For this reason, each programming language has to go through a special program called a compiler, which converts each language into machine code. Well-known programming languages include JavaScript, Java, PHP, and C#.