Software and Law - 1: Coding

Before we dive into the law surrounding software and technology, let us try to understand what "software" is. 

Often googling about this would give you results such as "Software is a set of instructions and documentations which tells a computer what to do". This is correct. But lets deep dive into it and understand this better. 

It is correct to say that software is a "set of instructions" provided to a computer. But how are these instructions provided to a computer? How do you tell your computer to do certain things? 

This is done by providing instructions to the computer in a code/language which it can understand. 

To do this, we begin by writing these "set of instructions" in human readable language using any text editor you have on your system. This process is called "Programming". 

Now Programming doesn't really care about the formatting such as bold/italic/underlined fonts, font size or type of font. It just needs simple plain text with a set of instructions which is in human readable form. This is called "Source Code".

Though writing source code doesn’t require any specific software or application, it can be beneficial if to write them on dedicated applications/editors which is designed for this purpose. Such source code editors have special characteristics in them which allows a programmer to type source codes with much ease. Just like how a word processor like Microsoft Word highlights the errors in your text, a source code editor highlights the errors in programming. 

Computers only understand ones and zeros i.e., binary code. This corresponds to "on" and "off" state in computers. Once we have our source code, it is then converted/compiled/combined into binary code which a computer can understand.