Career of a Computer Programmer.

Essay by imjustjohnJunior High, 9th gradeA-, January 2008

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Computer Programmers design and create programs that allow the computer to fulfill specific tasks. The programs they create can be from things to help businesses to video games. A computer programmer may spend an hour working on a simple program, but on a highly advanced program may take a year.

Almost half of the computer programmers of 2002 had a bachelor's degree. And 1 out of 5 Programmers had a graduate degree. 7.7 percent of computer programmers have graduated from high school or have had less education. 15.2 percent have had some collage but no degree. 11.6 percent have had an Associate degree. 48.6 have had a Bachelor's degree. And 16.7 percent have had a Graduate degree. Required education is different from job to job.

Programmers design a program and then they convert it into a set of instructions for the computer to follow. They then code these instructions into a programming language such as COBOL, Prolog, Java, C++, and Smalltalk depending on the purpose of the program.

COBOL is used for business applications when C++ is used for scientific and business programs. Most programmers know more than one language and because most of the languages do not have that many differences between them they are not terribly hard for the programmer to learn. After the Program is finished they use a process of testing and debugging. In this process the programmers test it to see if it does what it is needed and come up with correct results. If there are Errors the programmer must go back and fix the problem and retest the program for more errors.

There are two main types of programmers. There are application programmers and system programmers. Application programmers write programs to perform a specific task. System programmers write programs that control your...