Computer programming is the process of developing an executable set of instructions that are designed to accomplish some task. There are many computer programming languages. Some notable ones include:

• [1950s to 1970s] Assembly Language, FORTRAN, LISP, COBOL, Pascal, C, SQL
• [1980s] C++, MATLAB, Perl
• [1990s] Python, Visual Basic, R, Java, JavaScript, PHP
• [2000s] C#, Go, TypeScript

Some of these languages were designed for a specific purpose, for example, SQL was designed for database operations, R was designed for scientific computing, and JavaScript was designed for web development. We’ll use Python, which is a highly-popular general-purpose programming language, meaning you can do almost anything with it.

Motivation

All of us use computers, including smartphones and tablets, all of the time. Everything on these devices is a product of computer programming. Hopefully that’s motivation enough for this topic, but we can provide even more. If you ever have a task that requires you to repeat a process over and over, that’s a signal that a computer program might be able to do it a lot more efficiently. If it’s a one time deal and it’s a manageable amount of information for you to manually process, it may not be worth the effort of building a program. However, if it’s a routine task or too large for an individual to handle, then it’s a ripe opportunity for some automation. Let’s revisit our example of a business that wants to find the distance between each pair of its customers.

Software Tools

An integrated development environment (IDE) provides a comprehensive set of tools for developing and running computer programming code, such as syntax highlighting, code completion and refactoring. A few notable ones include:

• Visual Studio
• Eclipse
• NetBeans

We’ll use Jupyter Notebook, which is a web-based IDE.

We’ll of course also need the programming language itself, Python.

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