IT has put lots of clerks out of work by taking the boring repetitive processes they had are replacing them with machines that do far more far quicker. All the important work they would have done (for example calculating an pension liability against investments held and their daily values) could be dismantled to a series of mind-numbing processes. These actions are then logically collected into either sequences, loops, conditions etc. If you can dismantle processes far enough and then write the lowest lever of operation in a language that the computer understands, you are a programmer.

Consider making a cup of tea. What steps would you have and what could they be further broken down to?

High level process to make a cup of tea:-
Okay? Let's move on another layer.

Two level process to make a cup of tea:-Right, not let's go further, and again, and ....... no perhaps let's not, but you get the picture.

At some point, you might want to cater for 50 people, i.e. 50 cups and you have a bigger pot that will make 20 cups so you have a loop where you make the pot three times, then another loop to pour and milk one cup 20 times stopping if there are either no cups left or a total of 50 have been poured.

Of course there might be exceptions to normal processing where you have a decision for some who may not want milk or those that want sugar.


It gets more and more tedious the more you analyse it, however computers are incredibly stupid. They are incredibly good at adding up and comparing plus they do not get bored so they can be given really basic stuff to do over and over again.


If you can break human processes down small enough, you are building the logic, then you just need the tools to tell the computer what to do and you are off and running. Don't be scared. Anything that is important should be safely copied away beforehand. Computers don't break real things and at worst you recover from where you started. Ever the most complex database and application should be recoverable.



Robin