What are strings?  Are they words?  Sentences?  Well, kind of.  Let's start a little closer to the machine.  It should be commonly known that computers don't understand human language.  To be a little more thorough, computers don't understand anything but on and off, binary.  We are very fortunate these days to have lots and lots of layers between us and the computer, but briefly, chunks of memory can be used to store ones and zeros in patterns that correspond to numeric values. Code pages map those numeric values to specific characters.

Bonus Question: Do computers know the difference between the Latin alphabet and Chinese characters?  Go ahead and talk about that in the comments.

Characters...how do they become strings?  Let's talk about Arrays for a moment.  Arrays are collections of primitive data types, and characters are a primitive data type.  So are words arrays of characters?  Yes, but a string can include more than one word.  In fact, one of the characters in a two word string would be a space.  That's right.  Space is a character, so a string containing "one two" is a single string exactly 7 characters long.

So strings can be individual words.  They can also be multiple words.  They don't even have to be words that make sense to you or me.  How many characters can a string have?  That's when you get into the specific implementations of programming languages.  Fortunately, while it's a good question for you know the answer to for whatever languages you choose to use for programming, it's also not a question I have set out to answer.

Learning to program is only connected to things like machines, languages, and the web because writing a program for a machine using a particular language makes it easier to see the result. There have been lots of calls for everyone to learn to code.  In most cases, no one saying this is saying that everyone should learn to develop software.  No.  That's too large a thing to learn.  It takes years to build the kind of experiences it takes to be a developer.  It takes knowledge of constructs that are incredibly interwoven into the fabric of our digital lives.

Programming, coding, is different from development.  It's about data structures and algorithms. What kind of information you're going to manage, and how you will manage it. That sounds exactly like something everyone should learn to do; however, I don't know for sure that you should.

All of us are different.  We all have different strengths and weaknesses.  But you know...we have something in common: Machines are better than we are at the actual task of manipulating information.  Alternative facts aside, machines have more reliable memory, and they adhere to strict rules about how to manage information.  Once told what to do, a machine will execute that command exactly as it is written. We are not as disciplined.  So by all means, learn about data structures.  Learn about algorithms, but don't think that you have to be able to build a fully functional web application.  That stuff is very difficult.

Computer programming languages exist so humans can communicate with machines that only understand on and off, the 1 and 0. It would be a a very difficult task. Currently, there are big pushes to make code reusable, and it occurs to me that programming languages are actually a level of reusable code. For instance, programming languages all have keywords, reserved character sequences that are established in the language for managing information.

Of course each keyword has its own purpose, but there are ways that we can group them below this inclusive list. By the way, this group of keywords is an array of strings, one of several kinds of information. Some of the keywords describe objects, a concept that Object Oriented Programming (OOP) capitalizes on (for example: class, abstract, public, private, static).  Other keywords describe the flow of the program over information (some examples include: if, for, try, finally, continue, return).  Still others describe what are called primitive types of information (for example: char, byte, int, long, double, short).

These keywords allow us to organize and manage information in a computer system, but it's the general concepts behind the keywords that allow any programmer to pick up new languages when necessary because while programming languages change over time, how information is managed is pretty firmly established.  New languages may focus more on one style of information management, like OOP languages focus on constructing models of complex types to organize closely related pieces of information and behaviors.