I’m a data science student trying to understand the inner working of a data program. I was stuck on what an API meant. I got an example referring to the API as the waiter at a restaurant. I sat on this idea (I’m a very conceptual person with an imaginative mind). It got me wondering, it would make sense for the order written on the notepad to be the IDE, like visual studios, it just the environment where the code is written. I have no way of confirming this idea, but if this were true, where is the code being processed?

I learned that API code also exists, which I am assuming is like the operations, and functions that can be used to code that make up an algorithm. Which leads to my question again, how is it processed? I also know the API goes to the database to check on the info, does the API process the data at the database?