how to understander this: "Representation Is the Essence of Programming " from The Mythical Man-Month

Question

how to understander this: "Representation Is the Essence of Programming " from The Mythical Man-Month

what do your think the Essence of Programming?

Answer 1

I think he is trying to emphasize the importance of thinking about how your data is represented, not just the algorithms that process this data.

That being said, I don't believe this is the essence of programming.

Answer 2

Object oriented programming is in fact based on representation of real objects, classic examples appear on school classes... the "Student" class, the "Car" class... the Student class has string ID, name, lastName etc. In the real world it is like that. String is not a bunch of characters, like you would write on a piece of paper, it is a configuration of 0 and 1 that represent a bunch of characters

Hi-tech software simulates the real world with the laws of the physics that represent the real world. Robots try to do what they are meant to do because the programmer represented the problems to be solved by them with some kind of algorithm.