part igetting started with python defining what an application is as previously mentionedapplications provide the means to define express human ideas in manner that computer can understand to accomplish this goalthe application relies on one or more procedures that tell the computer how to perform the tasks related to the manipulation of data and its presentation what you see onscreen is the text from your word processorbut to see that informationthe computer requires procedures for retrieving the data from diskputting it into form you can understandand then presenting it to you the following sections define the specifics of an application in more detail understanding that computers use special language human language is complex and difficult to understand even applications such as siri have serious limits in understanding what you're saying over the yearscomputers have gained the capability to input human speech as data and to understand certain spoken words as commandsbut computers still don' quite understand human speech to any significant degree the difficulty of human speech is exemplified in the way lawyers work when you read legaleseit appears as gibberish of sorts howeverthe goal is to state ideas and concepts in way that isn' open to interpretation lawyers seldom succeed in meeting their objective precisely because human speech is imprecise given what you know from previous sections of this computers could never rely on human speech to understand the procedures you write computers always take things literallyso you' end up with completely unpredictable results if you were to use human language to write applications that' why humans use special languagescalled programming languagesto communicate with computers these special languages make it possible to write procedures that are both specific and completely understandable by both humans and computers computers don' actually speak any language they use binary codes to flip switches internally and to perform math calculations computers don' even understand letters -they understand only numbers special application turns the computer-specific language you use to write procedure into binary codes for the purposes of this bookyou really don' need to worry too much about the low-level specifics of how computers work at the binary level howeverit' interesting to know that computers speak math and numbersnot really language at all