There's not much point to this post, but whatever.  I've met several people recently who, when they learned that I'm a programmer, indicated that they had some ideas about how programming works.  These ideas are generally not correct so I want to briefly go over the basic process and tools people like me generally use.

First off, I don't know any programmers that use WYSIWYG editors.  "WYSIWYG" (pronounced "wiz-ee-wig") stands for "What you see is what you get" and it refers to programs that show a preview of the content you're creating as you create it.  For example, in Microsoft Word, if you underline a section of text, you can see the underline immediately.

There are a lot of programs such as Dreamweaver and FrontPage that let people make websites by manipulating graphic elements rather than writing code.  These tools are great for casual web designers, but it's virtually impossible to create any serious applications that way.  Every programmer that I know writes their code by hand, line by line.

• Code Completion - Let's say I have a function called "UserInfo" that returns information about the current user's account.  When I start typing that function name, a list shows up displaying all the functions and variables that start with what I have typed so far.  This both saves time since I don't have to type the entire function name and it helps me remember what functions and variables are called when I can't remember exactly.

• Syntax Highlighting - Most code editors display words in different colors based on what they represent.  Maybe functions are blue, variables are green, etc.  This makes it a lot easier to look at a page and mentally break down the structure.  It also warns you if there's an error in your code because things might not won't be colored correctly.

• Debugging - Most of the time, fixing problems is a lot easier than finding problems.  Something goes wrong and you can't figure out why.  Debugging tools allow you to set breakpoints on lines of code so that the program pauses whenever that line is executed.  This way you can slowly walk through the code and find out exactly where the problems begin.

These are just a few of the features that code editors use to make a programmer's job easier.  The point is, if you're trying to visualize how a program is created, it's created by writing line after line of text with a few shortcuts.  There's nothing that fancy going on.  It's not like the movies where there are ones and zeros flying across the screen and a bomb is about to explode.

You may wonder why I felt the need to write this post. Well, I have no idea. You may now return to what you were doing.