1.

1 Introducing the Python Programming

Language
For the thousands of years of human history before the mid-twentieth century, humans collected,
analyzed, and created data by hand. Digital computers were a revolution not just in technology but
in civilization because of their ability to store more data than could fit on all the sheets of paper in
the world, and to perform computations on this data faster and more reliably than an army of
humans. Today, we rely on complex computer programs to operate on data in a variety of ways,
from sending messages back and forth with loved ones, organizing data in documents and media,
to running simulations of physical, social, and biological systems.

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Yet for all their computational power, computers have one fundamental limitation: they have no
agency, no inherent ability to make decisions about what to do. All they can do is take a set of
(possibly very complex!) instructions, what we call a computer program, and execute those
instructions—no more, and no less. And so if we, as computer scientists, want to harness the
awesome power of computers, we need to learn how give these instructions in a way that a
computer understands.
We need to learn how to speak to a computer.

What is a programming language?

Just as languages like English enable communication between humans, a programming language is
a way of communicating a set of instructions to a computer. Like human languages, a
programming language consists of a set of allowed words and the rules for putting those words
together to form meaningful phrases. A programming language must be precise enough to be
understood by a computer, and so uses a relatively small set of words and very structured rules for
putting them together when compared with the rich complexities of any human language.
Learning a programming language can be frustrating at first, because even a slight deviation from
these rules results in the computer being unable to comprehend what we’ve written. But our time
and efforts spent mastering the rules of a programming language yield a wonderful reward: the
computer will not just understand what we’re saying, but faithfully execute any instructions we
write.

A program is simply the text of the instructions we wish to tell the computer to execute. We call
this kind of text program source code, or code for short, to differentiate it from other forms of
text. To write programs in a particular programming language, we need to understand two key
properties of the language. The first is the syntax of the language, which is the name we give to
the rules governing what constitutes a valid program in the language. 1 Before a computer can
1 Programming language syntax is analogous to the rules of grammar governing human languages, which tell us how
words are meant to be put together to form sentences.

execute a program, it must read the instructions for the program; the syntax of the programming
language specifies the expected format of these instructions.

The second concept is the semantics of the programming language, which refers to the rules
governing the meaning of different instructions in the language. 2 Once the computer has read the
2 This is analogous to the meanings of words in a human language.

instructions in a program, it begins executing them. The language semantics specifies what the
computer should do for each instruction.

The Python programming language

Just as there are thousands of human languages in the world today, each with their own
vocabulary, grammar, and stylistic conventions, so too is there a plethora of programming
Python
languages that we can choose from. In this course, we’ll use the Python programming
Pythonprogramming language
programminglanguage
language,
language
which offers a simple, beginner-friendly syntax and a set of language instructions whose semantics
are both very teachable and powerful enough to accomplish some truly amazing things, as we’ll
see throughout this course!

Now, neither our computer hardware nor operating system understand the Python programming
language directly. Instead, the creators of Python wrote a program called the Python interpreter,
whose job is to take programs written in the Python programming language and execute the
instructions. 3 You can think of the Python interpreter as a mediator between you the programmer,
3 So when you “download Python” onto your computer, what you’re actually downloading and installing is this
Python interpreter program.

writing instructions in Python code, and the computer hardware that actually executes
instructions.

There are two ways of writing code in the Python language and giving that code to the Python
interpreter to execute it. The first way is to write full Python programs and save them as text
files, 4 and then tell the Python interpreter to run that file. This is the standard way of creating
4 Python programs use the .py file extension to distinguish them from other kinds of text files, like .txt files that
you might have seen before.

Python programs: write the instructions, and then run them with the interpreter.

The second way is to run the Python interpreter in an interactive mode, which we call the Python
console or Python shell. In this mode, we can write small fragments of Python code and ask the
Python interpreter to execute each fragment one at a time. 5 The Python console is useful for
5
We’ll make the meaning of the word “fragment” more precise in the next section!

experimenting and exploring the language, as you get quick feedback after every single instruction
you write. The drawback is that interactions with the interpreter in the Python console are lost
every time you restart the console. So we’ll use the following approach through the course: use the
Python console to learn about and experiment with the Python language, and write full programs in .py
files so that you can save and edit them later.

A demo of the Python console inside the PyCharm application. While there are many ways of using the Python
interpreter, we’ll be using PyCharm as the standard way of creating and running Python programs throughout
this course.

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