getting started the church-turing thesis leads directly to the notion of turing completeness programming language is said to be turing complete if it can be used to simulate universal turing machine all modern programming languages are turing complete as consequenceanything that can be programmed in one programming language ( pythoncan be programmed in any other programming language ( javaof coursesome things may be easier to program in particular languagebut all languages are fundamentally equal with respect to computational power fortunatelyno programmer has to build programs out of turing' primitive instructions insteadmodern programming languages offer largermore convenient set of primitives howeverthe fundamental idea of programming as the process of assembling sequence of operations remains central whatever set of primitives one hasand whatever methods one has for using themthe best thing and the worst thing about programming are the samethe computer will do exactly what you tell it to do this is good thing because it means that you can make it do all sorts of fun and useful things it is bad thing because when it doesn' do what you want it to doyou usually have nobody to blame but yourself there are hundreds of programming languages in the world there is no best language (though one could nominate some candidates for worstdifferent languages are better or worse for different kinds of applications matlabfor exampleis an excellent language for manipulating vectors and matrices is good language for writing the programs that control data networks php is good language for building web sites and python is good general-purpose language each programming language has set of primitive constructsa syntaxa static semanticsand semantics by analogy with natural languagee englishthe primitive constructs are wordsthe syntax describes which strings of words constitute well-formed sentencesthe static semantics defines which sentences are meaningfuland the semantics defines the meaning of those sentences the primitive constructs in python include literals ( the number and the string 'abc'and infix operators ( and /the syntax of language defines which strings of characters and symbols are well formed for examplein english the string "cat dog boy is not syntactically valid sentencebecause the syntax of english does not accept sentences of the form in pythonthe sequence of primitives is syntactically well formedbut the sequence is not the static semantics defines which syntactically valid strings have meaning in englishfor examplethe string " are big,is of the form <linking verbwhich is syntactically acceptable sequence neverthelessit is not valid englishbecause the noun "iis singular and the verb "areis plural this is an example of static semantic error in pythonthe sequence /'abcis syntactically well formed )but