here’s a question I get asked quite often what is the definition of software well we can think of software using my favorite analogy which is it’s a box this is my software and we take some user input the software does something with the user input and it outputs whatever the output is numbers strings whatever it is it doesn’t really matter so that’s all software is is just simply a box that takes inputs and gives out outputs and it probably helps to think of software in really old-school terms if you had a factory and you will put any things like I in in you’re putting workers in there you’re putting water and electricity well what comes out of it you would get steel so this is an input and this is an output and software is absolutely no different to that software is simply inputs processing outputs now where people get a little confused as to what exactly software is is the name itself it’s soft and soft where the antonym of it is hardware so in the factory example we had physical items but in the software world we’ve got all of these ones and zeros flying around that we hear so often about and you don’t have to worry about these ones and zeros we never see them as programmers they are just in the background it’s what our code gets translated to so that’s all software is a system that takes inputs and gives you outputs
