Traditional programming and machine learning are essentially different approaches to problem-solving.
In traditional programming, a programmer manually provides specific instructions to the computer based on their understanding and analysis of the problem. If the data or the problem changes, the programmer needs to manually update the code.
In contrast, in machine learning the process is automated: we feed data to a computer and it comes up with a solution (i.e. a model) without being explicitly instructed on how to do this. Because the ML model learns by itself, it can handle new data or new scenarios.
Overall, traditional programming is a more fixed approach where the programmer designs the solution explicitly, while ML is a more flexible and adaptive approach where the ML model learns from data to generate a solution.