Welcome: What Is a Program?

Welcome! If you've never written code before, you're in exactly the right place. There's nothing to install, nothing to memorize, and no question that's too basic. We'll take this one small step at a time.

Let's start with the biggest word of all: program.

A program is a list of instructions

A program is simply a set of instructions that tells a computer what to do, step by step.

That's it. You already create instructions like this all the time, even if you've never called them a program.

Think about a recipe for making tea:

1. Boil some water.
2. Put a tea bag in a cup.
3. Pour the hot water into the cup.
4. Wait three minutes.
5. Remove the tea bag.

That recipe is a kind of program. It's an ordered list of clear steps that produce a result. A computer program works the same way: it's a list of steps, written down, that the computer follows in order.

Why do computers need such detailed instructions?

Here's the surprising part: a computer is not smart on its own. It can't guess what you meant. It does exactly what you tell it, in the exact order you tell it.

If your tea recipe forgot the step "pour the water," a human would figure it out. A computer would not. It would just hand you a dry tea bag in an empty cup and feel perfectly satisfied.

This is the single most important idea in this whole course: computers follow instructions literally. Learning to program is really learning to give clear, complete, ordered instructions.

What you'll learn in this course

By the end of these four short modules, you'll understand the core ideas that every program is built from, and you'll run your very first line of real code. You don't need any background. Let's go.