A program is a recipe. A process is the running kitchen.
A small mental model for separating code on disk from an executing instance.
Starter content: an introductory example for this new notebook, not a record of completed personal work.
Separate the file from the execution
A program is a set of instructions. A process is an executing instance, with state that the operating system manages: an address space, resources such as open file descriptors, and one or more threads of execution.
Running the same program twice generally creates separate processes. The instructions may be the same, but the process IDs and runtime state differ.
Where the analogy stops
The kitchen analogy helps distinguish instructions from activity. It does not explain scheduling, shared memory, or threads. Use it as a starting point, then replace the metaphor with observations from a real system.
A useful next experiment is to run two instances of the same command in a disposable Linux environment and compare their process IDs and parent relationships.