Pythonis a widely used general-purpose, high level programming language. It was initially designed by Guido van Rossum in 1991 and developed by Python Software Foundation. It was mainly developed for emphasis on code readability, and its syntax allows programmers to express concepts in fewer lines of code. Python is a programming language that lets you work quickly and integrate systems more efficiently.
Python is a high-level, interpreted scripting language developed in the late 1980s by Guido van Rossum at the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in the Netherlands. The initial version was published at the alt.sources newsgroup in 1991, and version 1.0 was released in 1994.
Python 2.0 was released in 2000, and the 2.x versions were the prevalent releases until December 2008. At that time, the development team made the decision to release version 3.0, which contained a few relatively small but significant changes that were not backward compatible with the 2.x versions. Python 2 and 3 are very similar, and some features of Python 3 have been backported to Python 2. But in general, they remain not quite compatible.
Both Python 2 and 3 have continued to be maintained and developed, with periodic release updates for both. As of this writing, the most recent versions available are 2.7.15 and 3.6.5. However, an official End Of Life date of January 1, 2020 has been established for Python 2, after which time it will no longer be maintained. If you are a newcomer to Python, it is recommended that you focus on Python 3, as this tutorial will do.
Python is still maintained by a core development team at the Institute, and Guido is still in charge, having been given the title of BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life) by the Python community. The name Python, by the way, derives not from the snake, but from the British comedy troupe Monty Python’s Flying Circus, of which Guido was, and presumably still is, a fan. It is common to find references to Monty Python sketches and movies scattered throughout the Python documentation.
Python is Popular
Python has been growing in popularity over the last few years. The 2018 Stack Overflow Developer Survey ranked Python as the 7th most popular and the number one most wanted technology of the year. World-class software development countries around the globe use Python every single day.
Due to the popularity and widespread use of Python as a programming language, Python developers are sought after and paid well. If you’d like to dig deeper into Python salary statistics and job opportunities, you can do so here.
Python is Interpreted
- Many languages are compiled, meaning the source code you create needs to be translated into machine code, the language of your computer’s processor, before it can be run.
- Programs written in an interpreted language are passed straight to an interpreter that runs them directly.
This makes for a quicker development cycle because you just type in your code and run it, without the intermediate compilation step.
- One potential downside to interpreted languages is execution speed. Programs that are compiled into the native language of the computer processor tend to run more quickly than interpreted programs. For some applications that are particularly computationally intensive, like graphics processing or intense number crunching, this can be limiting.
In practice, however, for most programs, the difference in execution speed is measured in milliseconds, or seconds at most, and not appreciably noticeable to a human user. The expediency of coding in an interpreted language is typically worth it for most applications.
Python is Free
The Python interpreter is developed under an OSI-approved open-source license, making it free to install, use, and distribute, even for commercial purposes.
A version of the interpreter is available for virtually any platform there is, including all flavors of Unix, Windows, macOS, smartphones and tablets, and probably anything else you ever heard of. A version even exists for the half dozen people remaining who use OS/2.
Python is Portable
Because Python code is interpreted and not compiled into native machine instructions, code written for one platform will work on any other platform that has the Python interpreter installed. (This is true of any interpreted language, not just Python.)
Python is Simple
As programming languages go, Python is relatively uncluttered, and the developers have deliberately kept it that way.
A rough estimate of the complexity of a language can be gleaned from the number of keywords or reserved words in the language. These are words that are reserved for special meaning by the compiler or interpreter because they designate specific built-in functionality of the language.
Python 3 has 33 keywords, and Python 2 has 31. By contrast, C++ has 62, Java has 53, and Visual Basic has more than 120, though these latter examples probably vary somewhat by implementation or dialect.
Python code has a simple and clean structure that is easy to learn and easy to read. In fact, as you will see, the language definition enforces code structure that is easy to read.
There are a variety of ways to get help for Python.
- Do a Google search, starting with the word “python”, like “python list” or “python string lowercase”. The first hit is often the answer. This technique seems to work better for Python than it does for other languages for some reason.
- The official Python docs site — docs.python.org — has high quality docs. Nonetheless, I often find a Google search of a couple words to be quicker.
- There is also an official Tutor mailing list specifically designed for those who are new to Python and/or programming!
- Many questions (and answers) can be found on StackOverflow and Quora.
- Use the help() and dir() functions (see below).
Inside the Python interpreter, the help() function pulls up documentation strings for various modules, functions, and methods. These doc strings are similar to Java’s javadoc. The dir() function tells you what the attributes of an object are. Below are some ways to call help() and dir() from the interpreter.
Python is a high-level, interpreted, interactive and object-oriented scripting language. Python is designed to be highly readable. It uses English keywords frequently where as other languages use punctuation, and it has fewer syntactical constructions than other languages.
- Python is Interpreted − Python is processed at runtime by the interpreter. You do not need to compile your program before executing it. This is similar to PERL and PHP.
- Python is Interactive − You can actually sit at a Python prompt and interact with the interpreter directly to write your programs.
- Python is Object-Oriented − Python supports Object-Oriented style or technique of programming that encapsulates code within objects.
- Python is a Beginner’s Language − Python is a great language for the beginner-level programmers and supports the development of a wide range of applications from simple text processing to WWW browsers to games.
Python’s features include −
- Easy-to-learn − Python has few keywords, simple structure, and a clearly defined syntax. This allows the student to pick up the language quickly.
- Easy-to-read − Python code is more clearly defined and visible to the eyes.
- Easy-to-maintain − Python’s source code is fairly easy-to-maintain.
- A broad standard library − Python’s bulk of the library is very portable and cross-platform compatible on UNIX, Windows, and Macintosh.
- Interactive Mode − Python has support for an interactive mode which allows interactive testing and debugging of snippets of code.
- Portable − Python can run on a wide variety of hardware platforms and has the same interface on all platforms.
- Extendable − You can add low-level modules to the Python interpreter. These modules enable programmers to add to or customize their tools to be more efficient.
- Databases − Python provides interfaces to all major commercial databases.
- GUI Programming − Python supports GUI applications that can be created and ported to many system calls, libraries and windows systems, such as Windows MFC, Macintosh, and the X Window system of Unix.
- Scalable − Python provides a better structure and support for large programs than shell scripting.
Apart from the above-mentioned features, Python has a big list of good features, few are listed below −
- It supports functional and structured programming methods as well as OOP.
- It can be used as a scripting language or can be compiled to byte-code for building large applications.
- It provides very high-level dynamic data types and supports dynamic type checking.
- It supports automatic garbage collection.
- It can be easily integrated with C, C++, COM, ActiveX, CORBA, and Java.
FEATURES OF PYTHON
Python is an interpreted language. That means that, unlike languages like C and its variants, Python does not need to be compiled before it is run. Other interpreted languages include PHP and Ruby.
- Python is dynamically typed, this means that you don’t need to state the types of variables when you declare them or anything like that. You can do things like x=111 and then x=”I’m a string” without error
- Python is well suited to object orientated programming in that it allows the definition of classes along with composition and inheritance. Python does not have access specifiers (like C++’s public, private), the justification for this point is given as “we are all adults here”
- In Python, functions are first-class objects. This means that they can be assigned to variables, returned from other functions and passed into functions. Classes are also first class objects
- Writing Python code is quick but running it is often slower than compiled languages. Fortunately，Python allows the inclusion of C based extensions so bottlenecks can be optimized away and often are. The numpy package is a good example of this, it’s really quite quick because a lot of the number crunching it does isn’t actually done by Python
- Python finds use in many spheres – web applications, automation, scientific modelling, big data applications and many more. It’s also often used as “glue” code to get other languages and components to play nice.
. Python is a High- Level Language
As we discussed in point 2b, it is a high-level language. This means that as programmers, we don’t need to remember the system architecture. Nor do we need to manage the memory. This makes it more programmer-friendly and is 1 of the key python features.
Python Is Portable
Let’s assume you’ve written a Python code for your Windows machine. Now, if you want to run it on a Mac, you don’t need to make changes to it for the same. In other words, you can take one code and run it on any machine, there is no need to write different code for different machines. This makes Python a portable language. However, you must avoid any system-dependent features in this case.
It is an Interpreted Language
If you’re any familiar with languages like C++ or Java, you must first compile it, and then run it. But in Python, there is no need to compile it. Internally, its source code is converted into an immediate form called bytecode. So, all you need to do is to run your Python code without worrying about linking to libraries, and a few other things.
By interpreted, we mean the source code is executed line by line, and not all at once. Because of this, it is easier to debug your code. Also, interpreting makes it just slightly slower than Java, but that does not matter compared to the benefits it has to offer.
Python Language is Object-Oriented
A programming language that can model the real world is said to be object-oriented. It focuses on objects, and combines data and. Contrarily, a procedure-oriented language revolves around functions, which are code that can be reused. Python supports both procedure-oriented and object-oriented programming which is one of the key python features. It also supports multiple inheritance, unlike Java. A class is a blueprint for such an object. It is an abstract data type, and holds no values.
Python is Extensible
If needed, you can write some of your Python code in other languages like C++. This makes Python an extensible language, meaning that it can be extended to other languages.
Let us look at some more Python features.
It is Embeddable
We just saw that we can put code in other languages in our Python source code. However, it is also possible to put our Python code in a source code in a different language like C++. This allows us to integrate scripting capabilities into our program of the other language.
It had Large Standard Library
Python downloads with a large library that you can use so you don’t have to write your own code for every single thing. There are libraries for regular expressions, documentation-generation, unit-testing, web browsers, threading, databases, CGI, email, image manipulation, and a lot of other functionality.