Hello, and welcome to Python for

Everybody. My name's Charles Severance and

I am your instructor. We named this Python for Everybody because
we are dedicated to the notion that increasingly as our lives
are surrounded by technology, that we want you to become a maker of technology,
not just a consumer of technology. We want to change your
perspective from this side of technology where you are looking at it,
to the other side where you're back here. You are like a creator of the technology
and you can create things. And it takes a long time and you may not
want to be a professional programmer ever, you might just like read
a little bit of data, but we believe that everybody should
know basically how to program and how to get things done inside of
a computer, just as much to just be a responsible participant in a modern,
increasingly technically oriented society. Computers want to be helpful. They are
programmed, they are designed,
the hardware's designed. We'll talk about hardware
in the next segment. But it's designed and wired, and
when you apply electricity to it, it basically has one question, and
that is what do you want to do next? And if you think about your phone and
all the apps that you have on your phone, each app is like what to do next,
what to do next. So, as a programmer,
your job is to serve the user. The user has something they want to do. Maybe they
want to zing a bird towards
a pig or maybe they need to analyze some data, or maybe they want to do
something like talk to their phone and you have to be a real
advanced computer scientist. And so, as a user we just have so
many wonderful programmers who have put so much software that make
these phones intelligent. The hardware itself is
not all that intelligent. And our job as programmers is to act as
intermediaries between the hardware and the user to build something wonderful and
beautiful. And so, you can kind of imagine
that your job as a programmer is to intermediate between
the hardware and the end user. And if you're a professional programmer
and you're trying to sell your software, well, you're trying to imagine
what the world might want. And you could imagine all
these app stores, etc. And these are places that
you can build software, and exchange that software with
other folks, and help people out. And like I said,
we are trying to flip you from one side of this device to the other side
of this device, where you are the maker. And you can think of this as
a tool to manage your calendar, or drive your car and
read a map, or whatever. But when you look at it
from the other side, when you look at it from being
a programmer, you use things like compilers and interpreters and programming
languages and networks, etc. And we actually have tools that
we are going to learn to use. Python is a tool that the programmers
on the back side of this computer use to make new things for
the front side of the computer. Now, what's your motivation
to become a programmer? Well, the kind of gross motivation for professional
programmers is to build
something for everyone else to use. Like I worked on this open
source software called Sakai, which millions of people use around
the world, teaching and learning. It's very rewarding for me. I feel really good
about that. You might build a guest book for
a website. But that's generally not the first
thing that you're going to do with your programming skills. You might get some
data. You might be an accountant. Or you might be a lawyer. Or you might be a
librarian. And somebody's got some data and
you can't get a report out of this data, it's something you're
really curious about. Somebody says can you knock out
a little piece of Python code to count up the number of times
that this happens on Saturday, but then it also happens again on Monday. Tell us
how many times that happens. And so you write 40 lines of code and it
comes out and tells us what that data is. And that's really useful. The key
difference between writing
a program for someone else and writing a program kind of for yourself to consume
or just a few other people is the rigor. You don't have to be such a professional
just to write code that
you can use yourself. If it works and it gets you
the data you want, then job done. If you want to become
a professional programmer, then you kind of have to study how to
be more precise and more engineering. But we're not going to worry about
that in this beginning set of courses. We just want you to learn the mechanics
and the language of programming. And so we kind of want to take you,
like I said, from being a user to being a programmer. And as a programmer, you
start thinking
of yourself as living inside the computer. So you're a consumer out here. You're
clicking on buttons and stuff. And so as a programmer, you're going to
write code and that code is going to use data, networks, and CPUs, and memory, and
then do something for the user. So we're trying to change your perspective
and sort of pull you into the computer. Well, what are you doing in that computer?
What's code?
What's software? What's a program? Well, a program is like a sequence
of stored instructions. And the idea is that the computer itself at the
lowest level in the hardware is just not that smart. But it has a lot of
flexibility in that
if we give it the right instructions, it can do amazing things. If we give it right
instructions to
listen to voice, digitize the voice, and make sense of the voice, then you can
write
a program that can "hear". The computer doesn't hear,
the program hears. The computer makes it so that it can run
all the calculations that seems to make it hear, but a human being or
actually thousands of human beings made it possible so
that you could talk to your phone. And so you can think of, at the far end
of this, when you're building something really brilliant like the ability for
a computer to listen to you, you are taking you, and all your
creativity, and all the research that you've done and you're building something
really amazing and put it in the computer. But it is still a stored series of
instructions that runs step by step, and someone figured out every single
little step that has to happen. And so once we figured this out, we write the
instructions carefully and
then we give it to somebody. Here is a program that
does voice recognition. And if you're interested in it,
I say it's wonderfully creative. As a professional programmer,
I have loved my life. I have loved the kinds of things that
I do, that I build things for people. And I make them happy, and
then I sort of feed off of that and then I build something else. But ultimately
it's just
a set of instructions. If you're like,
what's in a set of instructions? Well, here we go. Here is a program for a human
being. Now I may be showing my age a little bit,
but this is a YouTube video. Hopefully, it's not taken down
by copyright or whatever. On this song called the Macarena. And so, the Macarena is
an algorithm or
a series of steps that hopefully you, five years ago or many years ago
you would got to the bar and you'd watched all these
people doing these things. Putting their hands up and putting their
stuff around, and wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, and turning around, right? And you're
sitting there,
and you're like okay, what's the sequence of
instructions that you're doing? As a matter of fact,
there's a looping thing. As long as the music plays,
you put your left hand out, you put your right hand out. You flip your left hand.
Flip your left hand, flip your right hand. I forgot all about it. But, here's
something I want you to do. I want you to look at this slide. Now, I'm going to be
quiet for a minute. I want you to look at this slide,
pause the video if necessary. This, there are three
bugs in this program. It looks right, but there are three bugs. So I'm going to
stop for a second. So hopefully you paused, if you had to. But now I'm going to
come back and
I will show you what the bugs are. And here are the three bugs. Now if you didn't
find them,
even if you looked closely, you have learned something
about human beings and that is that we human beings
operate in an error-filled world. There are typographical errors,
people say things incorrectly. And we as people just fix them as we're
perceiving them, as we understand them. But even as you read this,
you might not have seen these mistakes, because your brain just fixed them because
we just fix errors in our environment. It's what we do. Computers aren't like that,
they are not like that. Although voice recognition,
after a while, that software does learn how to filter out errors, but
that was really hard to write, okay? Computers do not understand how to filter
out errors, but with enough instruction, you can kind of get them
to filter out errors, okay? And that's why search
engines kind of work, they're, it's sort of a soft intelligence,
but it was really hard to build. But when we start talking
about writing programs, whether it's writing programs
to do search engines or writing programs to do voice recognition,
those programs have to be perfect. They make the tiniest text
contextual or typographical error. those programs simply do not work. And so, here
we go. So here we say right ham
to the back of the head. What? Where was there ham in this? So you got this ham in
your hand, and
you went, hit in the back of your head. You may not notice this, but the computer
is literally going to say,
syntax error, I quit, right? And so, syntax error is the moment
where the computer says to itself, I don't know what to do. And the same thing is
true here. I gotta hit somebody,
what are you talking about? And so the computer is going to
be completely lost by this. You might look at this and you might
just fix it and compensate for it. So that's sort of a little set of
programming, programs for people. So that's the code that's right. So, let's talk a
little bit
about programs in Python. Like I said, it's a set of instructions.
So I'm want to put up some text here and I want you to count the number
of each word in this text and then tell me what's the most common word
is and how many times this word occurs. Here we go. Count, just count, concentrate,
concentrate, concentrate, concentrate, and part of
the interesting thing here is not so much whether you can count those words or
not, but how your mind is actually reacting to
the problem that I just placed you in. You're probably like, ooh,
this is just not good. I'm so good, I can drive a car, I can
play baseball, I can catch something. I can sing a song. And yet to be focused on
counting these
words seems really, really annoying. It turns out this is one of those things,
text analysis, is one of those things that computers are really good at and
we humans are really bad at. So it's really great to delegate
this problem to a computer, if you know the language of the computer
and you can talk to the computer. And so,
I don't expect you to look at this code. We're going to spend many weeks looking
at all the basics of this thing, but this is a program. This is a set of
instructions, it's got
two, six, about 11, 12 lines of code. And in it, we have instructed the computer
to read through a bunch of text, count the words, and
tell us what the most common word is. And so if we run this program,
and we give it a file of words, it'll say the most common word is
"to" and there's 16. That clown.txt that I just asked you,
"the" is the most common word, and there are seven of those. And so, this is a,
this is basically an outline of a program,
that, I mean, it is a program that gets
solves this problem that we will learn about. So, don't try to learn this right
away. Up next, we're going to talk about
the hardware architecture and what goes on inside the computer that you're going to
make use of as you become a programmer.