Learn Python with me from scratch

Hello learners,

Welcome to my series on Learn Python with me from scratch.

Before we move ahead with the first lesson of Python, let me provide you with some background information on computer programming and language.

What is computer programming?

According to the definition of Wikipedia- "computer programming is the process of performing particular computations (or more generally, accomplishing specific computing results), usually by designing and building executable computer programs. Programming involves tasks such as analysis, generating algorithms, profiling algorithms' accuracy and resource consumption, and implementing algorithms (usually in a particular programming language, commonly called coding). The source code of a program is written in one or more languages that are intelligible to programmers, rather than machine code, which is directly executed by the CPU.

In simple terms, computer programming means providing a computer with instructions to carry out a specific task. A computer program consists of code that is executed on a computer to get the desired output or result. It is the work of programmers to learn various programming languages and tools to develop different computer programs. Programmers use code editor or IDE to write source code which is a code written in any programming language that other programmers can read and comprehend. Then the source code is converted to machine language so that it can be executed by the computer. The process of converting source code into machine language is called compiling. C and C++ are the examples of compiled languages.

There are other programming languages which do not use compiler, instead these use interpreter to read and execute the code. These interpreted programming languages are Java and PHP.

Types of Programming languages-

1) Machine language – a low level language that consist of 0's and 1's (binary). High level languages are compiled into machine code so the code can be executed by the computer.

2)Assembly language – a low level language that is compiled by an assembler. Assemblers translate human code to machine code.

3)Procedural languages – this approach goes through a series of procedures before a program is executed on the computer. (For example, Go and Julia)

4) Scripting languages – these languages oftentimes don't need to be compiled but rather interpreted. Interpreted means an interpreter will read and execute the code instead of compiling it into machine code. (For example, JavaScript and PHP)

5) Functional languages – this works with the idea of building complex programs through a collection of smaller functions. (For example, Haskell and Scala)

6) Object-oriented languages – this works with the idea of building programs around collections of objects. (For example, Java and Python)

Thanks for reading this blog. See you soon in the next blog. Till then, stay tuned and keep coding.

Sweta Sarangi