The traditional first program in C is to print the string "hello world!".

>>> print "hello world!"
hello world!
>>> 

up-arrow with the cursor and edit the line (using the backspace key) to have python say "hello yourname" (e.g. "hello Joe").

Programmers don't hardcode names and numbers into programs. We want the same program to serve anyone and any set of numbers. Instead we use variables (which hold variable content) to hold any value/string that could change. Using any combination of recalling old lines, editing and adding new instructions that you can figure out, execute these two lines in order.

>>> name = "Joe"	#note "Joe" is a string. Note 2: comments in python start with '#'
>>> print "hello " + name
hello Joe
>>> 

Let print some numbers.

>>> age = 12
>>> print "hello, my age is " + age
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
TypeError: cannot concatenate 'str' and 'int' objects
>>> 

What happened here? print only knows about strings. In the above code, age is an integer, not a string. Let's make age a string.

>>> age = "12"
>>> print "hello, my age is " + age
hello, my age is 12
>>> 

You can't always rely on a number being available as a string. Maybe it was calculated from your birthdate and today's date, in which case it will be a number. You give print the representation (as a string) of the number.

>>> age = 12
>>> print "hello, my age is " + repr(age)
hello, my age is 12
>>> print "hello, my age is ", age 
hello, my age is  12