text_one.txt

Why should you learn to write programs?

Writing programs (or programming) is a very creative 
and rewarding activity.  You can write programs for 
many reasons, ranging from making your living to solving
a difficult data analysis problem to having fun to helping
someone else solve a problem.  This book assumes that 
everyone needs to know how to program, and that once 
you know how to program you will figure out what you want 
to do with your newfound skills.  

We are surrounded in our daily lives with computers ranging 
from laptops to cell phones.  We can think of these computers
as our personal assistants who can take care of many things
on our behalf.  The hardware in our current-day computers 
is essentially built to continuously ask us the question, 
What would you like me to do next?

Programmers add an operating system and a set of applications
to the hardware and we end up with a Personal Digital
Assistant that is quite helpful and capable of helping
us do many different things.

Our computers are fast and have vast amounts of memory and 
could be very helpful to us if we only knew the language to
speak to explain to the computer what we would like it to 
do next.  If we knew this language, we could tell the 
computer to do tasks on our behalf that were repetitive.  
Interestingly, the kinds of things computers can do best
are often the kinds of things that we humans find boring
and mind-numbing.

For example, look at the first three paragraphs of this
chapter and tell me the most commonly used word and how
many times the word is used.  While you were able to read
and understand the words in a few seconds, counting them
is almost painful because it is not the kind of problem 
that human minds are designed to solve.  For a computer
the opposite is true, reading and understanding text 
from a piece of paper is hard for a computer to do 
but counting the words and telling you how many times
the most used word was used is very easy for the
computer:

Our personal information analysis assistant quickly 
told us that the word to was used sixteen times in the
first three paragraphs of this chapter.

This very fact that computers are good at things 
that humans are not is why you need to become
skilled at talking computer language.  Once you learn
this new language, you can delegate mundane tasks
to your partner (the computer), leaving more time 
for you to do the 
things that you are uniquely suited for.  You bring 
creativity, intuition, and inventiveness to this
partnership.