Your First Real Code

This is the moment. Everything so far has been preparation, and now you get to run real code — in Python, a friendly, popular language. No setup, no fuss. Just press Run.

Meet print

Throughout this course we used the made-up word show to mean "display on the screen." In real Python, that word is print. Look how close they are:

print("Hello, world!")

Reading it in plain English: "Print (display) the text Hello, world! on the screen." That's a complete, real, working program. One line.

The small details, explained

• print is the instruction — it means "display this."
• The parentheses ( ) hold the thing you want to print.
• The quotes " " mark it as text (a string — remember those?).

Printing "Hello, world!" as your first program is a tradition among programmers going back decades. You're joining a very long line of people whose first real code looked just like this. Welcome to the club.

Now you try

The code box has print("Hello, world!") ready to go. Press Run and watch your words appear. That output was produced by you, by a real computer following your instruction.

Then make it yours: change the words inside the quotes to anything you like — your name, a greeting, a joke — and run it again. For example:

print("My name is Alex and I just ran my first program!")