Lather, Rinse, Repeat

In this chapter we introduce some core concepts of computer programming, starting with a couple of historical examples of computing machinery. We note the idea of representing numbers in a binary format, which is natural for computing systems, and differentiate between integers and floating-point numbers in computer programs. We then introduce a handful of abstract programming concepts such as branches, loops, input/output, and mathematical operations. We discuss how pseudocode can be used to represent a computer program in a language-independent fashion. I give an overview of different programming languages and suggest that at the moment, Python is probably the best choice of a first programming language. Next we express our problem of the falling ball from Chapter 1 first in pseudocode and then in Python. We find that a chief advantage of the program over the spreadsheet analysis of Chapter 1 is that we can easily vary the step size without starting our sheet from scratch.