I'm not even going to venture a guess on the lower-level similarities. It's certainly easy to say that, of course they'd use binary, it's the obvious, simple ch

I'm not even going to venture a guess on the lower-level similarities. It's certainly easy to say that, of course they'd use binary, it's the obvious, simple choice. But I'm not an alien and don't presume to know what they would find obvious. Their "computers" might be built by wiring a bunch of alien cow brains together until they get something that can navigate starships but can't be trusted to add two numbers together reliably. Things are made from what's handy and then grow from there, not necessarily from whatever is the most elegant or mathematically pure. One thing I would bet on is that they wouldn't code in anything resembling C++. Even now, only a handful of decades into human computing, languages are becoming increasingly high level and abstracted from the machines themselves. Assuming that our alien friends have had a few centuries / millenia to improve on things, I'd expect that they'd have progressed to much more intuitive, more automated, and less detail-oriented methods. Especially if we assume that they've developed reasonably strong AI, the very idea of "programming" could be as strange to them as someone building their own computer from wire and logic gates would be to us.