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Teach souls to fly
When I began working in the software industry almost all programming was done with “procedural” languages. In procedural languages (e.g. Cobol, Fortran, C, etc.) programs are composed of “modules” of procedures, where a procedure is a sequence of statements. In “C” for example, procedures are a sequence of imperative or directive statements, such as assignments, tests, loops and invocations of sub procedures. These procedures are functions, which map arguments to return statements.
As the industry and I moved on object-oriented programming (OOP) was widely adopted and to a large degree procedural languages became anachronistic. An object-oriented application organizes code into a collection of “objects”, which communicate by passing messages to request services that transform data. Objects are capable of passing messages, receiving messages, and processing data.
Regardless of the paradigm both “procedures” and “objects” are abstractions for a real world event a software developer is attempting to represent with “code”. Even the term “code” is an abstraction for numerical satements that a computer’s processing unit interprets. So it becomes quickly apparent that the entire software industry is a body of abstractions used to organize numerical data that can be converted into electrical impulses used to switch a transistor.
