The Economist explains

What is code?

Coding, or programming, is a way of writing instructions for computers that bridges the gap between how humans like to express themselves and how computers actually work

By T.S.

Some badly written Python, by the author. But it gets the job done

FROM lifts to cars to airliners to smartphones, modern civilisation is powered by software, the digital instructions that allow computers, and the devices they control, to perform calculations and respond to their surroundings. How did that software get there? Someone had to write it. But code, the sequences of symbols painstakingly created by programmers, is not quite the same as software, the sequences of instructions that computers execute. So what exactly is it?

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