Introduction to Programming (AIP2015)

Instructors

Christophe Pallier christophe@pallier.org
Sylvain Charron sylvain.charron@polytechnique.edu
Louis Thibault louist87@gmail.com

Objectives

Learn the principles of how computers work
Learn the basic concepts of programming (instructions/variables/loops...)
learn the bases of Python programming
Learn how to execute, design, write and debug programs

(see below for more details about the contents of this series of lectures)

Lecture materials:

The most up-to-date lectures materials are available in a git repository at https://github.com/chrplr/AIP2015

To download a local copy on your computer and set it up to easily update them, follow these instructions.

Too see the list of all html and pdf documents, check doclist.html.

Prerequisites:

This course is intended for beginners, but students who already have rudiments in programming (e.g. only know Matlab) can benefit from it. Also, note that knowledge of Python and of the skills listed below is a requirement for the other hands-on classes (Ateliers) of the Cogmaster.

Before attending AIP, it can help:

to study the learning modules on 'Python' and 'the command line' at (https://www.codecademy.com)[www.codecademy.com]
have a peek at the documents in the 'resources' folder, in particular How to think like a computer scientist.

During of after AIP, you may be interested in MIT's Introduction to computer science and programming online course.

Another excellent resource to go beyond this lecture is https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/sicp.html

More precisely, at the end of this series of lectures, you should have acquired:

Basic programming concepts

instructions/sequential exectution
forever loops
conditional statements
constants integers/floats/strings (insist that there are different types)
variables
lists/dictionaries
loops over sequences
functions/parameters/local variables
modules
file input/output

For example, you should be able to write Python scripts to:

search for items in a list
find the largest number in a list of integers
compute basic statistics from files containaint numeric data
compute the number of occurrences of words in a text file
play the "guess a number" game

Practical skills

You should know how to:

Download some source code (e.g. Python) from the Internet (e.g. github) and display it.
Run a program from the command line
- open a terminal, interact with the shell
- navigate the directory structure with cd/ls
- type commands, possibily with options or arguments
- interrupt a running program (using the process manager)
Execute a python script.
Install missing modules
Launch ipython and use it interactively (distinction shell/interpreter python)
Use an editor (atom) to view/edit a Python script
Find/read Python's documentation
what to do when there is a crash/error message

Computer's architecture

To program computers, it is necessary to have a rough idea of how they work.

Computer = Automaton + Memory store (Turing machines)
Intro to Machine language (Register machine Rodrego)
High-level languages. Compilation/interpretation.
What does an operating system do

Methodology of programming

divide-and-conquer approach, piping
writing code following our coding standards (see below)
debug with 'print'

Remarks

Our Coding standards:

use a common template for all scripts
force writing docstrings with aim, input & output descriptions
avoid global variables except for constants (use uppercase for identifier)
spaces around operators, after ',',...
use explicit names (lowercase ascii)
use comments sparingly, explain why, not how
factoring code (each step is a function, put docstrings)