Well, no, not in programming. I keep coming across the term “image” in relation to programming, and I never quite understand what it is, in layman’s terms. I’ve read Wikipedia etc., but their explanations are in the clouds, using too much technical jargon to be of much use to someone trying to form a basic, non-technical conceptual understanding of what an image is.
Just as an example, I was trying to get some sense of what Docker is, and suddenly the speaker was talking about an “image”. I assume developers much have a pretty solid idea of what that word means in this context. Can anyone explain what an image is in a way that their non-technical grandparent might understand?
In terms of taking a backup an image is a bit by bit identical copy of what is on the hard drive without any consideration for what any of it means (as compared to copying the actual files one by one where the order of reading the data is completely different and ‘empty’ space gets excluded). I would assume any other reference to an image in programming would be similar (that is an actual copy of the content without regard to its meaning).
Don’t know if this is what is meant in reference to Docker though (although the references to images for different operating systems seems to fit).
Thanks felgall. I tried to think of other contexts for when “image” is used, but of course failed. I often read about “mounting an image”, for example, and I think—there’s that “image” word again. And I wonder if it’s always referring to one essential, conceptual thing, or if it means different things in different contexts. (That seems to be the case, going by the various Wikipedia articles.)