Computers are complicated. They have a ton quirks and don’t always work the same way. So are humans.
There are all kinds of antidotes on how the computer came to be. For many it is a mystical device, for some it seems quite simple.
The whole idea of the computer is True versus False. The computers today are so powerful and so small because of our society’s expansion of knowledge in manufacturing process, but more importantly the physical world. Physical science, being the introductory iceberg tip of practical knowledge and sciences.
Binary to some is as foreign as another galaxy. To others it is a black box, often used at free will to shock and aw cinema goers, but for some people binary is a very practical utility.
Now I have never built my own language, or even gone through the steps of rebuilding someone else’s (unlike many CS students throughout the latter half of the 20th century), but most of them will tell you there is not much to it other than patience.
Below is a graphic of how Binary might work in an ideal, allegorical kind of situation.
Our minds make similar computations at quantum speed, and we even have a wildcard “?” to add to the array of 1’s and 0’s. We can call that working memory, or why so many companies are excited about the multimillion-dollar quantum computers.
A program language, an operating system, or just about anything else that uses binary operates under similar principles found in the graphic, expect in far more simple ways. Low level languages do the very least, leaving most the work to the engineer, while High level languages do more work and allow the Engineer to be more creative and less detailed. But no matter the language they amount to which the base of the language has been scaled is very insignificant in size to the way binary is used throughout the human condition.
It is amusing to hear politicians speak of “the server” or even call a big tech company to congressional hearing, because they are not well educated in the simplicity of it all. A phrase that many find themselves running into is the idea of it is a “black box, you don’t need to understand why it works, it just does”. In my experience the most complicated thing in the computer engineering world is understanding what another person’s idea of Binary is. Code is almost psychology when using a language or library that someone else made. With something as basic a True and False, things can get very complicated quickly. But I think everyone’s proverbial “North Star” with technology should be that it all does come down to rationality and patience will reveal exactly what the rational is.
