Why learn programming ?

- Computers are our "personal assistants" that can take care of many tasks on our behalf Non-programmers can only a computer with the supplied applications ("apps") Computer programmers can create new applications for themselves and others ! Benefits of learning computer programming:
  You can write computer programs that perform the mundane repetative tasks for you. You can write computer programs to automate some of your daily tasks Etc. etc.

Example "home-brewed" computer application

- Suppose you want to find the most commonly used word in some document....
      name = input('Enter file:')
      handle = open(name, 'r')
      counts = dict()

      for line in handle:
          words = line.split()
          for word in words:
              counts[word] = counts.get(word, 0) + 1

      bigcount = None
      bigword = None
      for word, count in list(counts.items()):
          if bigcount is None or count > bigcount:
              bigword = word
              bigcount = count

      print(bigword, bigcount)

DEMO: `Progs/words.py` --- use `words.txt` as input file

❮ ❯