L3IF Programming

Lecture notes by François Schwarzentruber (Work in progress)

Acknowledgement

I want to thank Michele Pagani for his support, as well as Alice Brenon and François Pitois.

Because you may become:
- a researcher, and you need to program prototypes or participate to the development of research software
- a teacher, and you will teach programming too and develop tools for your courses
Because you need to program in other courses.
Because it is fun to program!

This course covers the C programming language and Python .

With C and Python we cover various aspects of programming:

C	Python
low-level	high-level
memory handled by hand	memory handled automatically
statically typed	dynamically typed
weak types	strong types
compiled language	compiled in byte-code, then interpreted
tedious to install librairies	very easy to install librairies, via pip <3

Noticeably:

C is simple (KISS!)
With C, you will understand how your computer works
Important for your system and architecture courses
C is still used for system development (but not so much!)
The syntax of C is in many languages
A way to understand Rust, C++... and actually programming in general (and Tensorflow is coded in C++)

Python is really really really used everyhere (data science, machine learning, software development, backend, etc.)
Python has good libraries
- Django: Tutorial
Python is elegant
Python steals good features from other languages (Haskell, object-programming languages)
Python is used in education
A way to understand OOP, Javascript, other script languages
Python has a strong community

Collect few software or libraries you use and look in which languages they have been developped