How to Program a Computer

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to show you how to program a computer. There's a lot of ways for beginners to break into programming. Some people say you should use Java, other people say you should use C . But I'm going to show you how to use a programming language called Python which I think is the easiest for beginners who are getting started. To get going with Python, if you can see my computer, basically just point your web browser to Python.org. Now once you have Python installed, let's write a simple program by clicking on your start button, going to all programs. Let's find Python two point six and just run Python command line. Now this pulls up a simple Python interpreter, meaning Python is an interpreted language, and that means that it basically figures out what it's going to do as it's going over the line of code, as opposed to being a compiled language which is compiled into machine programming and just executed natively. Let's type in a simple program here. I'm going to show you how easy it is to program in Python. I'll say for i in range zero to twenty, and this basically says create a variable called i, and we're going to loop it from zero to twenty. Therefore i will be zero, then i will be one, then two, then three, on up until twenty. Type a colon, and then your enter. Now let's do a tab here, and we're going to say print hello exclamation point and make sure that's enclosed in quotation marks. Then space. Say plus. And then a STR for string. We're going to convert i to a string, and that's what you have to do in order to print it out with other text on the screen. Then another plus, and then say i times twenty is equal to... let's close our quote, then another plus. I'm going to say string again, i times twenty, that asterisk means multiplication. So basically we're going to print out the text hello twenty times and then the number that i currently is and then multiply i times twenty and print out what that is. I'm going to put a little space here after my hello so we can read it a little better. Say enter and say enter again. Now i as you can see has looped from zero to twenty, and it's saying it didn't include twenty. It's important to keep in mind. See i times twenty is zero, if i is ten, then i times twenty is two hundred. It just shows you how easy it is to kind of crunch some numbers in a programming language. Just search the internet for Python tutorials, you can find a whole lot more interesting stuff than this. My name is Dave Andrews and I've just showed you how to program a computer."