Outline

The idea

• Build on the intro unit

• Reinforce basic programming

• Think about larger codebases

• Work collaboratively

• Use version control (git/github)

Weekly Schedule

• Videos and other materials

• 1hr live session

• Dropin session

• 2hr lab

Unit schedule

Assessment

• Single coursework

• Deadline Friday week 24

• Group coursework (groups of 4-5)

• Different tasks within a shared codebase (using github)

• Individual short report

• More details later

Why Python?

• High level language

• Intends not to be hard to learn

• Suitable for scientific/engineering work

• Used heavily in data science etc

• Right tool for the job in student projects

Family tree (source)

How Python?

• Created by Guido van Rossum (BDFL) in the early 90s

• Derived from the C family

• Entirely open source from the outset

• Very popular after 30 years

• See discussions

• Named after Monty Python

Year reps?

Terminal

Quick demo...

Understand the $ convention for input/output. This you should type in the terminal:

$ ls
myscript.py
$ python myscript.py
stuff

These are Python commands (note >>>) and you should type them into python:

>>> x = 1 + 1
>>> x
2

Terminal

• CLI: Command Line Interface

• GUI: Graphical User Interface

Learning terminal and CLI is not optional here!

Command line

• Lower level way of interacting with computers

• More efficient

• Reproducible

• Composable

• Automatable

Terminal

Longer demo...

Build Python

$ wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.8.1/Python-3.8.1.tgz
$ tar -xzf Python-3.8.1.tgz
$ cd Python-3.8.1
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install

Github

We'll talk about this more later but here's CPython:

https://github.com/python/cpython

That's all

Make sure to meet your TA on Friday!