DAVID J. MALAN: In fact, just this past week,
I looked in my old CS50 binder, which I still have from some 25 years ago,
and took a photo of what was apparently the very first program that I
wrote and submitted and quickly received minus two points on.
But this is a program that we'll soon see
in the coming days that does something quite simply like print
"Hello CS50," in this case, to the screen.
And to be fair, I technically hadn't really
followed the directions, which is why I lost those couple of points.
But if you just look at this, especially if you've never programmed before,
you might have heard about programming languages
but you've never typed something like this out,
undoubtedly it's going to look cryptic.
But unlike human languages, frankly, which
are a lot more sophisticated, a lot more vocabulary, a lot more grammatical
rules, programming-- once you start to wrap your mind around what it is
and how it works and what these various languages are,
it's so easy, you'll see, after a few months of a class
like this to start teaching yourself subsequently other languages,
as they may come in the coming years as well.