I think people should just start learning programming, everyone basically. You know the human brain is wonderful, but it's very limited, and if you want to do complex calculations or searches or just comparing,testing, analyzing something, then your brain is no match to a Dual Core processor that they sell these days.

It's faster and definitely more reliable than your bad memory or your inability to pay attention to things for long. So learning to speak to the computer is probably one of the best skills a person can have in the 21 century.

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Learn Python

Let's learn Python, which is a very easy to learn language, best to use on Linux machines, but I believe it can be installed on Windows and Mac too. In this tutorial we will use Linux.

The language can be very powerful, and I am not expert in it, but I can easily teach you the basics here, just so that you can do some basic calculations.

First of all it's totally free , under Python Software Foundation License, like GNU/GPL, so you don't need to beg for permission like a slave from your corporate overlords to use the code in your own projects. You can essentially do almost everything you want in it.

It's 100% free, and it is already included in most Linux Distro's, so if you were to install Linux Mint right now, you can just have access to all of the free softwares there, including Python.

Python is the language, not the editor software, and there are many editor softwares that offer fancy editing experience like Visual Studio for C++, but none of that is needed for a novice.

You can literally just write the code inside the text editor, that is what I am doing, it's just so easy that your mind will be blown.

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Intro

So just open your text editor (gedit) it's essentially like Notepad in Windows but it has a better GUI and more customizable.

Then save the text file like test.py, where .py is the Python extension. Actually the extension is not even needed, unless you turn the file executable, which is only needed for complex projects, but we will just run the script from the terminal, whatever. If you don't name the file with the .py extension, then put this as the first row of the file #!/usr/local/bin/Python in order for the editor to know that we are programming in Python, and it will highlight the keywords as such. We will just go with the extension, it's simpler.

You run this script by opening the terminal and writing Python test.py, the Python command calls the Python software and it executes the file given. You can essentially run Python from the terminal, or code in the terminal, but it's easier from a text file that you can save.

Hello World

The first example is a hello world, where we make the script return us hello world. To display text inside the terminal, because we will be using the terminal, the print command is used. Anything after the print is printed out.

If there are multiple arguments, then use ( ) brackets to separate them, like multiple variables, otherwise for simple text output we use " or ', essentially if you have a quote where the " is part of the text, then use ' to wrap around it.

It looks like this:

And when we run it, it prints out our text.

If you have a quote, then we use the ' to wrap around the quote:

Looks like this:

So if you have to use quote marks " inside the text, or we call it string, then ' shall be used as external wrappers.

You can just enter print multiple times, each time in new row, to print out an empty line. I will actually use it like this, so that I don't have to edit out my username from the terminal in the screenshots.

Or more elegantly using the \n newline operator, with 1 print call:

You can also add a comment inside the code,which will not be read by the script, it's just there to explain to the reader what specific parts of the code do, like some stickers on your fridge.

The 1 line comment operator is # the multiline operator is ''' which must be closed. Essentially the multiline operator can be used to insert a license inside your code, while the single line operator is just a 1 line comment:

None of the comments is displayed when the script is executed, as I said, it's just for the programmer:

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That's it for the first episode, now you know how to display text in the terminal. It's nothing useful yet, but learning to use the print function is essential since this is the only way you can communicate with yourself from the terminal.

So make sure you understand how the print command works, and test it out yourself. It's the first step to learn programming in Python.

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Sources:
https://pixabay.com
Python is a trademark of the Python Software Foundation

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Upvote, ReSteem &