I think if we encountered aliens, they will not be "biological" but mechanical and electronic. These have by far the more superior characteristics needed for space travel.
The same holds for us, we are sending robots already and it will only be more and more robots in the future.
Also, "artificial" AIs will be the ones doing the programming. They can be extremely more complex than humans, because their electronic brains can actually be scaled up, and new data can be much faster interpreted and shared.
The code they write will be machine code, because they can compile their own abstract ideas themselves. On a low level the code will be extremely optimized. Like how an expert human programmer would optimize his 100 lines of assembly code in the 70s.
Resources will not be wasted, in fact they will have way more computing power and use it very effectively at the same time.
So, how would the code look like? Sadly only ones and zeroes. We would have to translate it to assembly ourselves and then extract more abstract concepts of it, for us to understand it.
"The code they write will be machine code, because they can compile their own abstract ideas themselves."
This doesn't seem likely. Unless this alien species is isolationist to the extreme, they'll need to communicate with others of their species. Therefore they need a language that can communicate high-level concepts, something assembly is not known to be good at doing.
Or to put it another way, even though we communicate with our bodies in a very low-level way (sending neural impulses to contract or relax muscles), our language is very high level. We don't say, "Fire neuron 10212, fire neuron 39232...", we say, "Come over here, please." We don't think in terms of firing neuron either; that's a job for the low-level subconscious.
In a similar way, I'd expect any artificial life form to have a language to express high level concepts, and "compile" with their subconscious.
The same holds for us, we are sending robots already and it will only be more and more robots in the future.
Also, "artificial" AIs will be the ones doing the programming. They can be extremely more complex than humans, because their electronic brains can actually be scaled up, and new data can be much faster interpreted and shared.
The code they write will be machine code, because they can compile their own abstract ideas themselves. On a low level the code will be extremely optimized. Like how an expert human programmer would optimize his 100 lines of assembly code in the 70s.
Resources will not be wasted, in fact they will have way more computing power and use it very effectively at the same time.
So, how would the code look like? Sadly only ones and zeroes. We would have to translate it to assembly ourselves and then extract more abstract concepts of it, for us to understand it.