All language subtitles for 4_Revisiting Abstraction

Earlier in this course,

we talked about how programs
are instructions that are given to a CPU.

We can send binary code or
bits to our CPU,

then they'll use an instruction
set to run those commands.

But these CPUS might be from
different manufacturers and

may have different instructions.

There might even be all kinds of different
hardware components like video cards and

hard drives that also have
their own special interfaces.

So how do we write a program that
the hardware can understand?

Well, one way would be to write a program
for each possible combination of CPU and

hardware using the native languages and
interfaces of these components,

but there are potentially millions of
possible configurations of hardware.

So how do we get anything to work with
all this complex and diverse hardware?

Well, thanks to the efforts
of computer scientists and

the principle of abstraction,
we can now use programming languages to

write instructions that can
be run on any hardware.