It is easy to romanticize Source Code. It has been done often enough: will you take the bluepill or will you take the redpill and plunge into the rabbit hole?
I assume you took the redpill because you're still here.
Another way to look at Source Code is to see it as a recipe, as the computer program is to cake. The cook is the programmer and he assembles ingredients into a recipe. The cook using the recipe turns that code into a finished product like cake.
For Masters of the High Temple of Computing, the Source is the way to interact with the machine. It is the human readable text that when transformed, it instructs a computer system to do something. Is it to eject a disk on your Mac's Finder? There's source code for that. Is it to press your start button on Windows? There is code for that.
Following this how to vote in an automated election, you already know that you will take this ballot, and feed it intothe 2010 Automated Election Machine, which is a computer that run several programs meant to do simple things. The machine counts votes for us and generates a canvass report. For election automation, the source code is the human readable version of the computer program that scans your ballot, counts votes, tallies it and generates reports based on that data.
So you got that an idea what Source Code is now?
In a manual process of counting, everyone can see how