Posts Tagged ‘programming languages’

Many modern computer users fear the arrival of a virus on their PC. It is the plague of modern computer technology. I myself have suffered from computer viruses, and had to reformat my computer. But I have learned many lessons, such as where do viruses come from, and how are they created? Maybe with this knowledge, you can avoid all the stress of viruses.

Viruses may come from a wide variety of places, but every virus is created by a computer programmer. The vast majority of these viruses are programed by cyber criminals, whose intent is to steal your personal information, use your internet connection for illegal activities, or fill your computer with spam and advertisements. However, there are a small subgroup of virus creators, mostly students, who will release a virus with purely malicious intent. These are the most dangerous to your computer, if not to your finances.

Of course the most common place for infection is the place where all computers must mingle with each other — the internet. Here computers open doors into themselves, through which information can travel from the outside world. But on that information, may be hidden viruses.

Most likely viruses will come from the grittier underworld of the internet. Porn sites and peer-to-peer file sharing or torrent download sites. If you can avoid these sites, it is very unlikely your computer will be hit with a virus. Another place that viruses like to hide is in emails. Many of these will be blocked by spam filters, but some will sneak through. Your best bet is just to delete emails from people you don’t know. Use your common sense. If you wish to take more serious measures, there are a whole host of antivirus protections that you may purchase. McAfee and Norton both make excellent products.

As to how viruses are created, this bit is more complex. They usually require some computer programming know-how, using one of the programming languages (Java, C++, etc.). However, as with everything these days, it is becoming increasingly simple. Do it yourself virus programs are becoming available for free on the internet. Simply download the program, click around a bit, and all of a sudden you have a virus that you can share with all your friends.

Viruses can be very easily blocked via Norton or McAfee. A simple application of common sense in which websites you visit, and which emails you open, can save you much worry and hassle.

Technorati Tags: computer programming, computer viruses, malicious intent, programming languages, virus creators

There are many professional categories in the domain of computer science. In this brief article, we look in to the responsibilities of computers programming professionals.

Coding, or in other words, program writing, is the main responsibility of computers programming professionals. For this there are dozens of programming languages available. In addition to that, the programmers are required to follow predefined conventions and standards when writing their code.

Writing the source code is just not enough to produce working software. The programmer is required to successful compile and link the source, so the program can work on the target platform. For this steps, there are software called compilers (such as C compiler), that convert source code to binary instructions.
Once the program is written by a computers programming professional, he/she is required to document the purpose of the source code and the business problem addressed by the software. In addition to that, the documentation should be sufficient for anyone to continue further developing the software.

Once computers programming professionals write individual components of software, the modules then need to be integrated. This is also performed by the programmer with the help of the software architect of the project.

Maintainability is one of the most important aspects of software development. If software is not maintainable, then it is not a good software program. Therefore, the computers programming professionals are required to add maintainability to their software.

Although we mention ‘Requirements analysis’ at a later point of this article than at the beginning, this is one of the most important first steps in the software development life cycle. The rule is that a programmer needs to know the requirement for writing a software program as he/she needs to write the program in such way that it meets the said requirements.

Largely, software testing is a different profession than computers programming profession. But, the programmers are required to dry-test their own programming code for obvious logical errors before the software program is passed to the software quality assurance team. Software quality assurance team then test for the software for functional and non-functional requirements specified by the clients.

Debugging is one of the last steps involved in computers programming. Once the quality assurance team finds ‘bugs’ in the software, the computers programming professionals are supposed to resolve the ‘bugs’. For debugging, programmer use different technologies and approaches depending on the tools used and the type of the ‘bug’. In general most of the functional and non functional bugs are caused by logical errors in the program level.

Technorati Tags: programmer, programmers, programming languages, programming profession