Python is a very powerful and widely-used language that will allow us to quickly build fairly complicated web applications. In this course, we’ll be using Python 3, although Python 2 is still in use in some places. When looking at outside resources, be careful to make sure they’re using the same version.
To break down what’s going on in that line, there is a print function built in to the python language, that takes an argument in parentheses, and displays that argument on the command line. To actually write and run this program on your computers, you’ll first type this line into your text editor of choice, and then save the file as something.py. Next, you’ll head over to your terminal, navigate to the directory containing your file, and type python something.py. In the case of the above program, the words “Hello, world!” will then be displayed in the terminal. Depending on how your computer is set up, you may have to type python3 instead of python before the file name, and you may even have to download Python if you haven’t already. After installing Python, we recommend that you also download Pip, as you’ll need that later in the course. When you type python file.py in your terminal, a program called an interpreter, which you downloaded together with Python, reads through your file line by line, and executes each line of the code. This is different than languages like C or Java, which need to be compiled into machine code before they can be run.