Let's start diving into the details and show you how professional software developers write software.

The first thing we need to learn when it comes to programming is how to think of and use our computer a bit differently.

We're going to focus right now on introducing you to the three main tools you'll use as a software developer:

1. A Terminal
2. A Text Editor
3. A Programming Language and Interpreter

Luckily, we've bundled all three of these into one tool, called an “integrated development environment” or the Learn IDE for short.

Let's start talking about the Terminal, also known as the shell. What we do from our shell includes running the programs we're building, navigating our file system, and executing system tasks, all things we're going to talk about a bit more later. The shell we're going to use is built into the Learn IDE.

The next thing we need to know about is called a text editor and it's basically exactly what it sounds like: a program to edit raw text. When we write code, it's really just text in a programming language that we save as a file. Think of it like Microsoft Word but instead of being used to write essays and letters, use it to write code.

The text editor built into the Learn IDE is based on an editor called Atom, which was made by the good people at GitHub. It is one of the most popular, extensible and powerful text editors ever created.

A programming language is a set of rules for how to express instructions to a computer. This code is written in regular English characters. Whether, Ruby, or Javascript, or C#, all programming languages are just conventions for organizing the logic and data that defines what the program you're writing does.

Now that we can write code in our editor and run system commands in our shell, the final piece of the puzzle is understanding how to execute or compile the code we write as we build programs.

Let's look at this in more detail.

When we want to run or execute our program, we have to tell the computer to do so. Before the computer can follow our instructions and run our program, the computer has to convert the code from the programming language we wrote it in to machine code. The conversion process from a programming language to machine code is called "compiling" (also sometimes called executing or running or interpreting) and it is done through a program called an interpreter. Every programming language comes with an interpreter that you can use to “run” your programs.

This is the programming process: write code in a programming language of your choosing using your favorite text editor, save the file, then execute your program by sending that file to the interpreter using your command line.

It may still sound a little abstract, but soon enough you'll be practicing these steps with the help of the Learn IDE, and it will all quickly feel very natural!

Continue to the Next Lesson.

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