Editor installed, Python working, and now the blank editor. My honest advice for a first program: make it embarrassingly small. One file, two lines. The goal isn't the program — it's learning the loop you'll repeat for years: write, save, run, read what happened.
Install VS Code from its website, open it, and add exactly one extension: click the four-squares icon in the left sidebar, search for Python, install the one from Microsoft. It gives you syntax coloring and the run button. Two minutes, tops. If the sidebar looks empty, that's just because your folder is empty so far.
Make a folder for your code — mine is C:\Users\ada\projects — open it with File → Open Folder, create a file called hello.py, and type:
print("Hello, world!")
print("Two plus two is", 2 + 2)The .py ending is what tells VS Code (and Python) that this is Python code. Type it out rather than copy-pasting — the typing is half the exercise.
The fast way: the triangle button at the top right of the window. The output appears in a panel that opens at the bottom.
The way worth learning from day one: the terminal. View → Terminal — it's already open down there. Click into it and type:
C:\Users\ada\projects> python hello.py
Hello, world!
Two plus two is 4python hello.py means: run the file hello.py with Python. Same result as the button — but the terminal is identical on every computer you will ever use, including the Linux server you'll meet someday, and servers don't have buttons. My opinion: learn the terminal first, keep the button for convenience.
Break it on purpose — put quotes around one of the twos:
print("Hello, world!")
print("Two plus two is", 2 + "2")Run it again and the news arrives in the terminal, not in the editor:
C:\Users\ada\projects> python hello.py
Hello, world!
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "hello.py", line 2, in <module>
print("Two plus two is", 2 + "2")
TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for +: 'int' and 'str'Two facts worth pulling out of the wall of text. The first line printed fine — the program ran until it hit the bad line. And the traceback names the file and the line number where it stopped. That's not the computer being angry; it's a map. I keep a whole post on reading a traceback from the bottom up.
From here on, it's one loop: change something, save (Ctrl+S — the dot on the file tab means unsaved changes), run again, read the result. Some rounds end with the output you expected, some with a traceback; both are progress. The terminal runs what's on disk, so saving is not optional. Fifty tiny rounds of that loop will teach you more than an hour of reading about Python.