You might not recognize this word but chances are that you’ve seen at least a little bit of what looks like text on a screen before – they’re called “source codes”! You may not know much about them yet, but learning how to read and write them could give you access to great opportunities for jobs with companies who create web pages or social media applications!
Source code is the computer code that programmers use to create websites, apps, and other software. It consists of a series of instructions in a particular programming language. You might have seen some source code before if you’ve ever looked at HTML or CSS on a website or app. But what is it exactly?
It doesn’t take much imagination to see why source code is important when creating software like websites and social media apps.
Source code is a set of instructions written in programming language that tells the computer how to behave. In other words, it’s the personification of what we want our computers and devices to do for us – think of it as directions from your concerned babysitter!
Table of Contents
Examples
Following is a JavaScript source code that triggers on browser loading.
document.addEventListener( 'DOMContentLoaded', function () {
var elms = document.getElementsByClassName( 'splide' );
var options = {
type : 'loop',
perPage: 4,
perMove: 4,
pagination: false,
gap: '1em',
breakpoints: {
768: {
perPage: 2,
perMove: 2,
},
}
};
for ( var i = 0, len = elms.length; i < len; i++ ) {
new Splide( elms[ i ], options ).mount();
}
} );Purposes of Source Codes
All software needs to have instructions written in a language that computers can understand. The primary purpose of source code is to make it easy for programmers to write programs, and more importantly, debug the program when there are issues with how it works. In order for someone else – or even the original programmer themselves – to be able to edit these instructions later on down the road, they need to be clearly documented so other people will know where everything goes!
Source code also helps us learn about what our devices do without having them tell us; if you’ve ever wanted your phone’s battery life displayed permanently at the top right corner instead of only appearing after pressing an icon in your menu bar every time you turn off your screen (a real pain in the neck, I know!), you can do it by updating your phone’s source code.
How to Modify Source Codes?
It’s important to understand that this is a two-sided deal – the programmer and the computer. The human can’t do anything with source code unless they teach their own machine how to read it, which is possible because most programming languages are based on English so we humans have some idea of what words mean!
To modify source code, programmers can use different types of tools. A wide range of options are available for programmers, depending on what kind of software they have to create. They can use a text editor like Notepad or TextEdit and then compile the source code with an SDK in order to run it as part of their project. This is most common among beginners who don’t want all the extra buttons and functions that come along with IDEs such as Visual Studio Code does offer them because they’ll do just fine without these extras if you’re not experienced enough yet in programming language knowledge.
