the first few steps what is programand what is programmingtodaymost people are experienced with computer programstypically programs such as wordexcelpowerpointinternet explorerand photoshop the interaction with such programs is usually quite simple and intuitiveyou click on buttonspull down menus and select operationsdrag visual elements into locationsand so forth the possible operations you can do in these programs can be combined in seemingly an infinite number of waysonly limited by your creativity and imagination neverthelessprograms often make us frustrated when they cannot do what we wish one typical situation might be the following say you have some measurements from deviceand the data are stored in file with specific format you (cthe author( lingeh langtangenprogramming for computations pythontexts in computational science and engineering doi --