Programming Introduction Introduction
You have three days before the school talent show which Past You—the eternal time management optimist—decided to volunteer for as MC. (You can't blame Past You; after all it was just after Neil Patrick Harris's flawless 16th time hosting the Candy Bar Awards and you wanted to be just. Like. Neil.) Now Present You realizes that finals are a week away and you just don't have time for your hosting duties.
It would be fine if you didn't have the job of figuring out how to organize acts. And the stakes could never be higher. The crowd might start throwing things if they see six Mulan covers in a row. (Don't get us wrong: that movie's great, but it doesn't take many off-key voices to make you start rooting for the Huns.)
But wait! You don't have to manually figure this out. You have a computer to do it for you. Sure, you could use it for just scrambling to finish papers at 2am, but there's a whole world of programming languages and code just waiting to be used.
If you program the right commands, it could easily solve your problem, leaving you plenty of time to study. And by study, we mean read the latest news on NPH.
…What? Finals are a whole week away.
Why Should I Care?
There are countless projects built from programming languages and all of their creators started where you are right now: reading this Shmoop learning guide.
Okay, no, Shmoop hasn't been around long enough for that. Instead, they actually sat looking at a screen, trying to figure out how to make a computer print words.
It all starts with learning how to solve a problem. Start by assuming that every problem has a solution. (We aren't going to talk of those problems without solutions—don't even ask us about how blankets work.) Sometimes a problem has more than one solution. The trick is finding the best solution.
Do you get what we're throwing down?
When you learn how to program, you aren't just learning how to print words to a screen, you're learning how to solve problems. When you know how to solve problems, you can make amazing programs.
And it all starts with a print line.