How can I explain to my parents that I study programming languages?

Question Detail: 

I am currently finishing my MSc in computer science. I am interested in programming languages, especially in type systems. I got interested in research in this field and next semester I will start a PhD on the subject.

Now here is the real question: how can I explain what I (want to) do to people with no previous knowledge in either computer science or related fields?

The title comes from the facts that I am not even able to explain what I do to my parents, friends and so on. Yeah, I can say "the whole point is to help software developers to write better software", but I do not think it is really useful: they are not aware of "programming", they have not clue of what it means. It feels like I am saying I am an auto mechanic to someone from the Middle Ages: they simply do not know what I am talking about, let alone how to improve it.

Does anyone have good analogies with real-world? Enlightening examples causing "a-ha" moments? Should I actually show a short and simple snippet of code to 60+ year-old with no computer science (nor academic) experience? If so, which language should I use? Did anyone here face similar issues?

Asked By : effeffe

Best Answer from StackOverflow

Question Source : http://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/56888

Answered By : Lieuwe Vinkhuijzen

If you have a few minutes, most people know how to add and multiply two three-digit numbers on paper. Ask them to do that, (or to admit that they could, if they had to) and ask them to acknowledge that they do this task methodically: if this number is greater than 9, then add a carry, and so forth. This description they just gave of what to do that is an example of an algorithm.

This is how I teach people the word algorithm, and in my experience this has been the best example. Then you can explain that one may imagine there are more complex tasks that computers must do, and that therefore there is a need for an unambiguous language to feed a computer these algorithms. So there has been a proliferation of programming languages because people express their thoughts differently, and you're researching ways to design these languages so that it is harder to make mistakes.

This is a very recognizable situation. Most people have no concept that the computers they use run programs, or that those programs are human-written source code, or that a computer could 'read' source code, or that computation, which they associate with arithmetic, is the only thing computers do (and data movement, and networking, maybe).

My research is in quantum computing, so when people ask me what I do, I don't attempt to explain that. Instead, I try to explain that quantum physics exists (they've usually heard of Schrödinger's cat, and things that are in two places at once), and that because of this strange physics, faster computation might be possible.

My goal is to leave the person feeling a little more knowledeable than they did going in, feeling excited about a world they didn't know existed, but with which you have now familiarized them. I find that that's much more valuable than explaining my particular research questions.