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this task involves flying a rocket to the moon, driving a car down a road, or controlling a walking robot to an electric outlet to recharge its batteries. The more you divide a larger task into smaller tasks, the harder it can be to understand what problem you’re even trying to solve. This gets even worse when you start writing actual program commands. The two parts of most programs are the commands that tell the computer what to do and the data that the program manipulates. So if you wrote a program to identify the current speed and direction of a rocket, the commands would tell the computer how to retrieve this information and the speed and direction would be the actual data the program uses.

Essentially, program commands are separate from the data that they manipulate. If one part of a program manipulates data incorrectly, the rest of the program winds up using that contaminated data and you, as the programmer, won’t know which part of the program screwed up the data.

This is like sitting in a baseball game, ordering a hot dog from a vendor, and having six people pass your hot dog down to you. When you see fingerprints all over your hot dog, can you tell which person touched your food?