What’s the difference between programming and coding

Kemil Beltre
2 min readMay 31, 2022

People often talk about programming, but they usually don’t know what programming is and instead confuse it with coding

In this article, you will understand what programming means.

Coding

Coding is the easy part of programming, which is means writing code in any programming language without worrying about the details.

Programming

We can divide a programming tasks in 3 subtasks:

  1. What the program should do, which means that we need to understand the requirements first before do anything. We need to think carefully about that because, if we don’t have an idea of how the programme should work, we won’t know how it should not work.
  2. How the program should work, this part is the algorithm level, starting from the example that we take some random algorithm, there’s no programming language involved, and you write that, it’s an algorithm, it’s not a piece of code. And the easy part is to take that algorithm and code it in some particular programming language.
  3. Descriptive, Good naming conventions and clear architecture go a long way, if the code is readable then you typically don't need much in the way of additional documentation. There's really only a need to document novelty, and novelty should be avoided wherever possible.

Programmers:

Knows the requirements (What the software does).

Thinks well about how it should be implemented before the implementation.

Documents it well so that it could be easily understood (this can be using tests, clean code or explain a complex algorithm in plain English).

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