Computers do exactly what you say
The hard part of writing CODE is not the typing. It is that a computer follows your instructions with no judgement whatsoever β it does precisely what you wrote, never what you meant. Tell it to repeat something one time too many and it will, cheerfully, for ever. Most of the words in this grid exist to close that gap: SYNTAX is the grammar you have to get exactly right, LOGIC is the reasoning underneath, and a COMMENT is a note you leave for whoever reads the PROGRAM next, which is usually you in six months.
Two mathematicians who died before computers
Two words in this grid are named after men who never saw a computer. BOOLEAN honours George Boole, an Irish mathematician who died in 1864 β roughly eighty years before there was any machine to run his ideas on. ALGORITHM goes back much further, to al-KhwΔrizmΔ«, a Persian mathematician writing in Baghdad in the 800s, whose name reached Europe in Latin translation and stuck to the idea of a step-by-step procedure.
Boole worked out an algebra in which the only values are true and false, and where 'and', 'or' and 'not' behave like arithmetic operators. He believed he was describing the laws of human thought. He was, as it turned out, describing the thing every processor on Earth would eventually be built from β which is why a BOOLEAN is one of the first types any coder meets.
The moth in the logbook
In September 1947, engineers working on the Harvard Mark II traced a fault to an actual moth caught in a relay. They removed it, taped it into the logbook, and wrote that they had been debugging the machine. The page survives in the Smithsonian, and it is why every coder still hunts a BUG and reaches for DEBUG rather than 'fix'.
The insect was a coincidence β engineers had called faults bugs for decades before that. What the logbook captured was the moment the word crossed from machinery into computing and stuck there permanently.
Four ideas build almost everything
Under all of it sits a very short list. A VARIABLE remembers something. A LOOP repeats. A choice decides between two paths. A FUNCTION packages a chunk of work so you can use it again without rewriting it. Combine those four and you can build a game, a website or a spacecraft's flight software β the difference is scale and care, not extra ingredients. DATA gets shaped into an ARRAY or a STRING along the way, and a BOOLEAN answers the yes-or-no questions.
Beneath the readable words, the machine only understands BINARY: ones and zeros. A COMPILER translates for it, and the CONSOLE shows you what came back β the OUTPUT that tells you whether your INPUT did what you hoped. PYTHON is a kind first language largely because it reads close to English, so beginners argue with the problem rather than with the punctuation. A SCRIPT is simply a short PROGRAM run straight through from top to bottom, and a KEYWORD is one of the small set of words a language reserves for itself and will not let you use for anything else.