this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2025
120 points (91.1% liked)
Programming
24058 readers
496 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Make computers do stuff for what purpose?
I joke to my family that I just name things for a living. When you take away all the incidental stuff like files and pointers and ports, that’s really all it is. “This sequence of events with these properties is called , and when you ask our system what to do about it, it does this other sequence of events with these properties which we call .”
It’s kinda like those ancient stone tablets that are the first example of writing, and they’re just like “Ramses owes Jeremiah 5 chickens” or whatever. It’s just how we manage abstract concepts moving around our civilization. Yeah there’s math involved, but every endpoint is a human being in one way or another.
For whatever task you're trying to get them to do. Predict the weather, solve an equation, format a document, etc. Computers can do useful things. We program them so that they do those things.
This is the most ELI5 thing I've ever written. If you actually understand programming and you don't realise that it exists to make computers do things then you're surely just being deliberately obtuse.