I always tend to present it to beginners as a way of the computer to tell you what is going on. Programming is (among other things) the art of knowing how to s

I always tend to present it to beginners as a way of the computer to tell you what is going on. Programming is (among other things) the art of knowing how to speak to a computer and gow to interpret the things it says. That means everything that damn thing says gives you hints of how it "sees the world" and how you therefore need to describe things to it so it can execute them for you.