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PROLOGUE

Programming—What and how?

Aryan: It was fun learning scratch over the last few years.
Gowri: Yes, Mam told us that scratch was introduced to help us learn basic programming
concepts.
Aryan: Is it? That was programming. I always imagined programming as
some complex mathematical stuff in English (difficult to understand syntax).
Gowri: Yes, and you might have pictured a male, who does not speaks or
interact with anyone and can hack into systems.

Aryan: Yes...
Gowri: These all are misconceptions that many people have about
programming or programmers.

Aryan: Ok. Is it not all true?
Gowri: Not at all. Let me tell you some facts. Firstly, do you know who
was the first programmer of the world? She was Ada Lovelace, a woman.
Moreover, Grace Murray Hopper, who was also a woman who developed
the first compiler for programming language.

Aryan: Oh.. is it.
Gowri: And no, you don’t have to be a genius or a mathematician to code.
If you know basic maths and have patience, interest, and determination,
you can learn to code. Rest you know practice makes a person perfect.

Aryan: Yes, indeed! Thank you for telling me all these facts. Now I am more interested
in learning to code. I know now it’s not boring and nerdy. And you said that the first
compiler was developed by a woman. What is a compiler?
Gowri: Good question! Whenever we give step-by-step instructions to the computer, we
write them in an easy, English-like language.But computers only understand the language
of 0s and 1s, which is called binary language. So complier converts our step by step
instructions to computer language of 0 and 1.
And now let me tell you what coding is. Coding means giving step-by-step instructions
to the computer to perform a task and reach a specific outcome.

Aryan: Like what we used to do in Scratch, in the script area?
Gowri: Yes, that was coding. We can do coding in many languages. Like, I talk
to you in Hindi or English as you understand these languages. Similarly, to
give instructions to computer we need to learn its language. Here we will be
starting with python.

Programming—What and how? 9