If you do end up installing Python yourself, make sure you installPython 3. The previous major version, Python 2, has reachedend-of-life at the end of 2019 and is no longer in active development.For a beginning programmer with an interest in linguistics, Python 3 isan improvement in every way, because it is much stricter about how ithandles text data, making data corruption or silent processing errorswhich yield spurious results much less likely.