Write a sentence. The computer does it.

The Python engine on this page is RustPython, a Python rebuilt so that it can run inside a browser. It is not quite the same as the Python people install on a computer. Programs that open files on your machine or use the network will not run here — those need NME installed on your own computer. Everything else behaves the same in both places.

First steps

Three sentences, and you can already write programs.

Press “open this” on any of them. It appears in the box above; press Run and watch. Nothing here can break anything.

1. 1. Say something

   A sentence that starts with say puts words on the screen.

   say Hello
   say I am learning to write programs

   open this

2. 2. Ask a question

   ask for stops and waits for you to type. The answer is kept under the name you chose, and you can use that name later.

   ask name What is your name?
   say Nice to meet you name

   open this

3. 3. Do it many times

   Put a number and the word times in front of anything.

   5 times say I will not forget this

   open this

That is the whole idea. Everything else is more sentences — the guides add one at a time, starting from exactly here.

Sentences are not a toy

Lists, records, stories, a clock, named jobs — all of it is sayable.

Sentence grammar is not a warm-up you grow out of. It is the language. The first sixteen guides do not contain a single line of Python.

say slowly The door opened.
1 second wait
say slowly Nobody was there.

clear the screen
draw a line
say in a box Shop

start the timer
ask answer Ready?
show elapsed

set items to an empty list
append apples to items
show how many items
show items joined by comma

set book to an empty record
put Mina at Seoul in book
show Mina in book
show how many book

to greet:
    show Hello
    show Nice to meet you
end
do greet

set die to random number from 1 to 6
30% chance say You found a coin

Who writes in it

People who find Python hard — and people who find Python boring.

Half a joke: NME is unusually well suited to paper coding — writing a program by hand, on paper, away from a machine. There are no quotes and no brackets to get wrong, and a line reads back as a sentence. Running it still happens here.

Three ways to write the same thing

You can ignore the other two for as long as you like.

NME turns what you write into Python — a language a great many people already use. The panel on the right of the box above shows that happening, live. You never have to read it. It is there for the day you are curious, and for the day someone asks you for “the Python”.

3 times say Welcome

3 times: say "Welcome"

for i in range(3): print("Welcome")

Learn

Everything is on this site. You never have to open GitHub.

The guides go in order, each one short, each one adding a single idea. Every example in them opens in the box above and runs in the same tab — on a phone too.

• The guides, in order Start at the first one. All of Part 1, and eighteen of Part 2's twenty, are sentences only.
• Five minutes, from nothing If you would rather read one page than browse a list.
• Every sentence the computer understands The full list, beside the Python each one becomes.
• Ask your own AI Paste one message into ChatGPT or Claude and it can write NME.
• The exact rules All three ways of writing, what each means, how they mix.
• A longer path Projects that end with a small language you wrote yourself.
• Turn Python into sentences Paste a Python file, get an easier version back.