Basic Computer Programming

Welcome! I'm really excited to help you start your coding journey. Before we dive into the concepts, I'd love to know a bit about what you want to build and if you have a specific language in mind.

I want to make games or mobile apps.

That is so exciting! Both game development and mobile app design are fantastic ways to learn how to code because you get to see your ideas come to life visually.

To point us toward the perfect tools for the job, are you more interested in building mobile games (which often use engines like Unity with C#) or native mobile apps (like iOS apps with Swift or Android apps with Kotlin)?

I want to build native mobile apps!

That's awesome! Building native mobile apps is an incredibly rewarding path because you get to create something that lives directly in people's pockets.

Before we build our roadmap, I have one quick question to make sure we tailor the examples and concepts perfectly to your goals.

Are you interested in building apps primarily for iOS (iPhone) using Swift, or Android using Kotlin?

Android (Kotlin)

Kotlin is a fantastic choice for building Android apps, and it's a remarkably friendly language for beginners! Before we start writing Kotlin code, it helps to understand what computer programming actually is and how your code tells a device what to do. Let's take a look at our roadmap for this session so we can see how we'll build up your skills step by step.

Your path

Variables and Data Types

Control Flow and Conditionals

Loops and Collections

Functions and Mobile Concepts

What is Programming

At its absolute simplest, computer programming is the act of writing a precise recipe of instructions for a computer to follow. Computers are incredibly fast, but they are also completely literal. They don't have common sense, so they won't guess what you mean. If you leave a step out of your recipe, the program won't work as expected. When we write code, we are taking a big goal—like "display a list of messages in a chat app"—and breaking it down into a highly detailed, step-by-step procedure called an . Your phone takes this algorithm, runs through the instructions one by one at lightning speed, and presents the result to the user. Let's look at how that actually translates from the English text you write into something a smartphone can process.

How Code Executes on a Device

Computers and phones don't actually understand Kotlin or Swift out of the box. At their physical core, microchips only understand electrical signals—on or off, which we represent as 1s and 0s (machine code). To bridge this gap, we use a special tool to translate our human-readable Kotlin code into instructions the phone's hardware can execute. We call this translation process .

A sequential timeline showing human-readable Kotlin code compiled into binary machine code running on a smartphone.

Now that we have the absolute basics down, let's explore how Kotlin fits into this picture and how it compares to other options out there.

Continue: Let's compare Swift and Kotlin

Let's compare Swift and Kotlin, which are the twin powerhouses of modern mobile development. If you look at them side by side, you'll notice they look so similar they could almost pass for siblings.

Two Worlds, One Philosophy

Swift was created by Apple for building iOS apps, while Kotlin was developed by (and later backed by Google) as the modern language for Android. Before these languages came along, developers had to use older, clunkier languages like Objective-C (for iOS) and Java (for Android).

Both Swift and Kotlin were designed with the same modern philosophy: make code safer, shorter, and much easier for humans to read and write. Because they share this modern heritage, learning Kotlin actually gives you a massive head start if you ever decide to pick up Swift later.

Kotlin vs Swift Syntax

Let's look at how similar they actually are. In both languages, creating variables, defining functions, and structuring logic look nearly identical. Take a look at this side-by-side comparison of how you write a simple greeting in both languages.

Feature	Kotlin (Android)	Swift (iOS)
Constant Variable	`val name = "Alex"`	`let name = "Alex"`
Changeable Variable	`var age = 25`	`var age = 25`
Print to Screen	`println("Hello!")`	`print("Hello!")`
Function Definition	`fun greet() { }`	`func greet() { }`

See how close they are? Kotlin uses val for constants (values that can't change) and fun for functions, while Swift uses let and func. The rest is practically identical!

Now that you see how modern languages look, let's look at why Google crowned Kotlin as the king of Android development, and why we'll be using it for the rest of our journey.