Computer programming (often shortened to programming) is a process that leads from an original formulation of a computing problem to executable computer programs. Programming involves activities such as analysis, developing understanding, generating algorithms, verification of requirements of algorithms including their correctness and resources consumption, and implementation (commonly referred to as coding^[1][2]) of algorithms in a target programming language. Source code is written in one or more programming languages (such as C, C++, C#, Objective-C, Java, Python, Ruby, Smalltalk, JavaScript, etc.). The purpose of programming is to find a sequence of instructions that will automate performing a specific task or solving a given problem. The process of programming thus often requires expertise in many different subjects, including knowledge of the application domain, specialized algorithms and formal logic.

Related tasks include testing, debugging, and maintaining the source code, implementation of the build system, and management of derived artifacts such as machine code of computer programs. These might be considered part of the programming process, but often the term "software development" is used for this larger process with the term "programming", "implementation", or "coding" reserved for the actual writing of source code. Software engineering combines engineering techniques with software development practices.