answer:This is a bit complicated, but I’ll do my best to explain. At a fundamental level a computer program is simply a series of instructions the CPU in your computer executes in sequence. Programming languages are either compiled or interpreted from code that people understand into code the machine uses to execute those very basic instructions. This code is known as assembly code (which is ultimately converted to machine code). Theoretically you could write a program like Photoshop in pure assembly code, but it would take you several lifetimes and your eyes would start bleeding within a couple of days of trying to work 100% in assembly. Not to mention that version of photoshop you wrote would only ever work on that particular chip architecture. Java is a compiled language, that means you pass your finished code to a Java compiler program which converts your human-readable Java code into assembly code that your CPU understands how to execute (and is really hard for people to understand). The compiler will catch many of your mistakes and will throw errors if you’re trying to violate the “grammar” (more commonly known as “syntax” in programming) of the Java language. One misplaced ’}’ or ’;’ and the whole process of compiling your program will fail. I’m not sure how ask-public is written, so it’s hard to say, but if it was written in Java, then yes, giving someone a GA will trigger code to execute on the server and it will update the webpage to display an incremented number next to the post (as well as other updates in other places). JavaScript and Java are two very different languages, despite both having “Java” in the name. Javascript was named that way as a marketing thing because “Java” was a popular language at the time and it was trying to “ride the coattails” of the Java name. JavaScript is not compiled by the way. It runs in an interpreter. Interpreters are constantly running. They take code and execute it “on the fly” as it comes in instead of having it all finished ahead of time and then converting it to assembly code all at once. A program that was compiled will run much faster than one that’s running in an interpreter, because there’s overhead (memory and CPU usage) involved in running the interpreter. Here’s a way to thing about it: Say there’s a book written in Korean (assuming you don’t speak it). In a compiled language, it would be like having the Korean book translated to English and published in an English book version for you to use. You could jump to any page and start reading the English version. An interpreted version would be like buying the Korean book, and getting your friend who speaks Korean to sit with you and you pointing to a paragraph in the book and having them translate it into English for you while you wait. It’s an inherently slower process to do “on the fly.” Hope that helps a bit.