Benefits of Computer Programming for Society

Regarding the Senior Project, my particular area of interest for my research paper and project is computer programming. The plan for writing the research paper will involve pulling articles on the benefits of programming that contribute to society as a whole.

Programming is a very beneficial part of today’s increasing population of people, as it creates opportunities for bigger projects that can lead into a more simplified way of living. This spans throughout multiple areas of our society, such as education for young children, personal computers, mobile phones, home security, and the medical field.

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One of the fields that benefit greatly from programming is the medical field. E. Kevin Hall is one of the most well-known doctor programmers. He created an iPhone-based study with an application that helps him learn how to improve his patients’ treatments. There were also several applications that other doctors use in order to make it easier for dealing with patients. One of these applications is a mobile program that lets diabetic patients share their blood glucose levels with their providers and caregivers. A second one pairs health and nutrition coaches with chronically-ill patients. Some applications also include collaboration and patient information being securely shared with other doctors. Several more of these applications include virtual consultation tools, video conferencing, mobile heart monitors, and wireless blood pressure cuffs. By the year of 2013, just about half of all doctors had some sort of electronic medical record system which could help doctors easily manage patient records, which was for doctors to perform their work better. The medical records aim to reduce medical errors and provide doctors with vital information about patients at critical moments (Farr, Christina). Mathew, a 15-year veteran of an emergency room at the Princess Royal University Hospital in the U.K., created an application that aimed at helping physicians manage the care of Parkinson’s disease patients, gathering data on the symptoms between clinic visits. The application analyzes the data and makes it more accessible to physicians in an easy-to-use format, which helps save time, and leads towards more informed treatments. Applications like that are used to connect doctors to their patients instead of serving as a barrier between them (bootcamp.case.edu).

Programming is also very beneficial to NASA with their mission towards getting into space. One of the ways it has helped NASA with space travel was the Voyager crafts one and two. This required people who knew some of the really old programming languages, which includes assembly languages from the late 1950s like Cobol, Fortran, and Algol. These old languages were used because the amount of space that was used to run the program was around 64 kilobytes of memory, which is not easy to run the modern languages of today. A feature that the voyagers would use is onboard computers which could make more functions of the spacecraft automatic instead of using a sequencer which would use radio or audio tones to turn on instruments. “The flight software was basically completely re-written in order to have a spacecraft that could be nearly autonomous and continue sending back data to us even if we lost communication with it”. This meant that there would be less human interaction with the voyager in-order to keep it in working order, and it would still send back data after losing communication. The engineers would also try to make a sort of ‘energy audit’ to check the remaining energy requirements of the instruments onboard and use shutdown procedures to make the most of the energy that was left on the spacecraft (Wenz, John). One of the people who heavily influenced space travel was Margaret Hamilton, who invented the modern concept of software and landed men on the moon. Her original plans were to obtain a graduate degree in math, but she stuck as a programmer at MIT. She invented core ideas in computer programming with her colleagues, writing the code for the world’s first portable computer and becoming responsible for the onboard flight software on the Apollo computers in the Apollo spacecraft, which was hatching a $400 billion industry. The computers were 70 pounds, and were portable unlike any other, being one of the first important computers to use integrated circuits rather than transistors, including an onboard navigation system designed to be operated by humans with ‘fly-by-wire’ autopilot, meaning the aircraft could fly on its own (McMillan, Robert). All of this together made it possible for Neil Armstrong to make it on the moon, and made space travel much more viable.

Programming is also very beneficial when it comes to the security of you