To the new journey

I wrote my first line of code back in middle school. My first language was BASIC, followed closely by Pascal. That means my brain was permanently scarred—uh, I mean, shaped—by BASIC’s love affair with GOTO statements and its wonderfully “structured” spaghetti code.

Thankfully, Pascal came to the rescue and taught me how to think procedurally, which felt like a huge upgrade at the time.

Fast forward to university, where I met Java. That was my first serious encounter with object-oriented programming (OOP). I basically had to rewire my brain to stop jumping around like GOTO and start thinking in classes, objects, and inheritance. It wasn’t easy—it took me quite a while to truly get the hang of OOP.

Years later, I switched jobs and my new employer was using Scala, so I had to dive into the world of functional programming whether I liked it or not. That meant yet another round of “re-learning how to think,” this time with functions, immutability, and all those brain-bending concepts. It felt like moving from building with Lego bricks to doing abstract math with lambda expressions.

And that brings us to today—me, starting a new blog, ready to talk about Python. Don’t worry, there won’t be any GOTO statements this time. 😉

Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language known for its clean syntax and readability. It’s designed to be easy to learn yet powerful enough to build anything from quick scripts to large-scale systems. Python supports multiple programming paradigms, including procedural, object-oriented, and functional styles, making it highly flexible for different types of projects.

🐍 Introduction to Python

Python is one of those rare languages that manages to be both beginner-friendly and incredibly powerful. Its clean, readable syntax makes it feel almost like writing in plain English, which is why so many people pick it up as their first language. But don’t let the simplicity fool you — Python is a fully-fledged, general-purpose language that can handle everything from quick automation scripts to complex backend systems.

It supports multiple programming styles, including procedural, object-oriented, and functional programming, so it adapts to how you like to think. Python started out as a humble scripting language, but over the years it’s grown into a powerhouse used in web development, data analysis, machine learning, automation, scientific research, and more. Thanks to its massive standard library and a thriving ecosystem of third-party packages, Python gives you the tools to build almost anything — fast.

👋 The Obligatory “Hello, World!”

No programming introduction would be complete without it. Let’s write our very first Python program:

print("Hello, World!")

print("Hello, World!")

That’s it. One line. No class declarations, no semicolons, no boilerplate. Just a friendly greeting to the world.

The print() function is built into Python, so you can call it directly without importing anything. Whatever you put inside the parentheses will be sent to the standard output (which usually means it’ll show up in your terminal or console).

In Python, strings can be wrapped in either single quotes ('Hello, World!') or double quotes ("Hello, World!"). They work the same way, so it mostly comes down to personal preference (or avoiding quote clashes inside the string).

And that’s pretty much all it takes to get started. Run the code, and if the words “Hello, World!” appear on your screen, congratulations — you’ve officially written your first Python program. 🎉