Within Software Engineering, programming (the implementation) is regarded as one phase in a software development process. There is an ongoing debate on the extent to which the writing of programs is an art, a craft or an engineering discipline. In general, good programming is considered to be the measured application of all three, with the goal of producing an efficient and evolvable software solution (the criteria for "efficient" and "evolvable" vary considerably). The discipline differs from many other technical professions in that programmers, in general, do not need to be licensed or pass any standardized (or governmentally regulated) certification tests in order to call themselves "programmers" or even "software engineers." However, representing oneself as a "Professional Software Engineer" without a license from an accredited institution is illegal in many parts of the world.

Another Ongoing Debate is the extent to which the programming language used in writing computer programs affects the form that the final program takes. This debate is analogous to that surrounding the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in linguistics, that postulates that a particular language's nature influences the habitual thought of its speakers. Different language patterns yield different patterns of thought.

Different programming languages support different styles of programming (called programming paradigms). The choice of language used is subject to many considerations, such as company policy, suitability to task, availability of third-party packages, or individual preference. Ideally, the programming language best suited for the task at hand will be selected. Trade-offs from this ideal involve finding enough programmers who know the language to build a team, the availability of compilers for that language, and the efficiency with which programs written in a given language execute.

Debugging is a very important task in the software development process, because an incorrect program can have significant consequences for its users. Some languages are more prone to some kinds of faults because their specification does not require compilers to perform as much checking as other languages. Use of a static analysis tool can help detect some possible problems. Debugging is often done with IDEs like Visual Studio, NetBeans, and Eclipse. Standalone debuggers like gdb are also used, and these often provide less of a visual environment, usually using a command line.

The details look different in different languages, but a few basic instructions appear in just about every language:

• input: Get data from the keyboard, a file, or some other device.
• output: Display data on the screen or send data to a file or other device.
• arithmetic: Perform basic arithmetical operations like addition and multiplication.
• conditional execution: Check for certain conditions and execute the appropriate sequence of statements.
• repetition: Perform some action repeatedly, usually with some variation.