I'm not looking for an outsider's definition of programming (which is easy enough to find). Rather I'm asking for an inside baseball answer. When you sit down in front of keyboard and screen and start working, what are you doing?
This question was inspired by: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/475072/how-exactly-do-you-judge-how-well-a-programmer-performs.
Programming is the art and science of building and maintaining computerized models of ideas, concepts and systems.
Three points I'd like to pull from this definition:
We can't really say that programming is strictly an art because there are definite right and wrong ways to accomplish a task. A programmer must know something about how their code will be interpreted by the machine that reads and executes it.
Every program is a model of something. Perhaps, as in a simulation, it is a model of something physical. Often, however, the thing that is modeled is something abstract. For instance, a standard GUI paradigm is "windows" which have almost nothing to do with physical windows. Rather, GUI windows are modeled after an interface concept that has been developed over many years.
Some people working with HTML may very well be programmers since they are creating a model of a document on the computer. If tags are used to improve the model of a document, it is in fact programming at a low level.
I see it as the flow of information. I think about elegant and readable ways in which I can channel and alter that information
Programming is solving word problems, just like those tough ones in eighth grade math. Except it's more difficult.
Accomplishing difficult things with skill and a bit of flair is one of the most fun things a person can do.
Programming is "writing software".
HTML is arguably data (input to a browser) rather than software.
Software itself is also, arguably, data rather than software (input to a compiler, intepreted by microcode), but then again not (software is software).
I see a programmer as a person who implements software requirements.
The architech designs the software specification, the programmer implements it, the validation engineer tests the software against the spec.
Programming is the practice of implementing algorithms.
Yes, I stole this almost verbatim from my programming and data structures professor ;)
I think this is sort of irrelevant pontification. It seems to be some attempt be inclusive of HTML as "programming." If you want to go down this line then we can contort our thinking to include the use of text editors (plain text editor like notepad) or playing a computer game (like minesweeper), or moving the mouse on the screen as "programming." However, that seems to be a strange view.
This gets talked about a lot and I just think it is not useful. If you want to have something that is not so inclusive as to be not demarcate "programming" from any other human endeavor then you could say something like:
A program is a set of procedures. A procedure may be formalized as a Turing Machine. Therefore, (arguably, this is not a strict implication) programming is working in some sort of problem space that can be recognized by a Turing Machine (or using a computer "language" that is Turing Complete, if you like).
Programming is knowledge capture and representation.
The representation must be so detailed that a few grams of beach sand understands it.
It must come in a rhetorical framework that allows managers, lawyers, QA, and users to believe in it.
edit
Requirements analysis, design documents and code all capture knowledge. They all describe how an actor interacts with a system to create something of value. Requirements and design are "high-level" and "fluffy" but all hsve the same purpose. They all capture knowledge about information, decisions, actions.
The rhetoric is "plans", "tests" and other evidence that the software "works". That it accurately captured the knowledge we expect (or paid for.)
I don't believe Programming means 'Computing'.
Many people will argue the "problem solving" facet which is so commonly tied to IT, but its not distinctly correct.
There are many ways to solve problems without computers.
'Programming is the practice of implementing algorithms.'
Isn't accurate either, you can implement algorithms without programming. ( Get out a Rubicks cube ;) )
To me, programming is:
the act of specifying a sequence of instructions, that can be recorded and performed at a latter time by an entity.
This is why I consider "DNA" as a form of "Programming", and there is also "Social Programming" and all sorts of programming contexts that exist outside IT.
Although, its important to note, that while you are programming, you are also practising other skills from other schools, such as math, problem solving, and logic.
The only part of these which is the "programming" phase is the serialisation of your ideas and logic and reasoning into instructions for an entity ( in this case, a computer ) to perform.
Programming is describing the solution, as a series of well defined steps, to some problem , in a language that both the computer and the programmer can understand.
At least that's the ideal.
When you sit down in front of keyboard and screen and start working, what are you doing?
I'm coding, but not just that ..
I'm trying to figure out how to organize code so that I can run my program as a series of self-explanitory instructions (function/method calls), rather than a long spaghetti of nested if/else/switch/while structures.
Although technically that's design, but that's the interesting part of the process.
Mindlessly typing things down is what code monkeys do .. (I think)
As explained by http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001130.html
Programming is all about knowing when to boil the orange sponge donkey across the phillipines with an orangutang gorilla crossed with a ham sandwich to the fourth power of twelve across the nile with an awful headache from the previous night when all of alfred's naughty jalapeno peppers frog-marched the nordic elves across the loom-lined geronimo induced swamp donkey over and above the fortran fortified kilomanjaro fence past the meticulously crafted anti disgusting sponge cake scenario where all the hats doth quoteth the milk which is not unlike the super werewolf from the infinite realm of ninja-step. it's hard to define, really.
When people ask me in real life, I tell them programming is writing the instructions for the computer to follow.
Programming is refining informal ideas into code. Code is an executable formalization. The work of coding often feeds back into changing the informal ideas you started from, making the whole process a learning cycle. It's best when the code communicates what you learned to other people -- when it's not just executable.
So is writing HTML programming? It is by this definition: it's executable; you can start with a vague notion of a layout you want to see, and try to code it in different ways; and HTML coders can learn from each other's pages. But HTML tags just can't express much, by design, so it's not very interesting to think of it as such. Turing completeness is a natural boundary to the expressiveness of a code we can call programming, but our actual notion of programming doesn't respect it: see e.g. Charity and Coq.
This is pretty similar to Jon Ericson's answer.
Programming is inserting programmed behaviors into a system. Advertisement and "Mind control" is a form of wet programming, us, we do soft programming, hardware engineers do hard programming.
Addendum: HTML is not programming, because its purely descriptive, just like static writing and static design work, they lack behavior. DOM manipulation and Javascript is programming, organizing html into a website is programming, but html itself is not more so than using paint.
A capital investment of effort into the logical structuring of a process so that it may be executed at lower cost.
HTML is tricky. On one hand, you might say it's not a process. On the other, you might say it's instructions for the browser's layout process.
When you sit down in front of keyboard and screen and start working, what are you doing?
Expressing ideas in executable form.
A program is just a long equation. Therefore, programming is the process of deriving that equation.
(concept from Dijkstra.)