Introduction to Python Programming
In this lesson, you will learn about python programming, its history and its uses cases.
What is Python Programming?
Python is a high-level programming language developed by Guido van Rossum in 1989. Python is interpreted, object-oriented, with dynamic semantics and it is an open-source language. It is the go-to choice for Rapid Application Development as it contains high-level built-in data structures. Learning python is simple, almost every syntax in python is easy to learn and understandable. It supports modules and packages, which helps in program modularity and code reuse.
Python provides increased productivity. Unlike the other high-level programming, languages python does not have a compilation step, which makes the edit-test-debug cycle incredibly fast. A source-level debugger allows inspection of local and global variables, evaluation of arbitrary expressions, setting breakpoints, stepping through the code one line at a time.
It is often used to build websites and software, automate tasks, and it is the most widely used language for data analysis. Python is a multi-purpose language making it available for a variety of different programs and it can’t be constrained for any specific problems. This multispecialty and its beginner-friendliness, has made it one of the most-used programming languages today.
The library in python is comprehensive and covers a wide range of inbuilt data. It enhances the ability of the language and it also makes it the most popular programming language.
History of Python Programming Language
The history of the Python programming language dates back to the late 80s. It was created by Guido van Rossum at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands as a successor to the ABC programming language. Guido is the lead developer from the beginning of the program till 12th July 2018 as he announced his retirement from his responsibilities as Python’s lead architect. He is fondly called the “benevolent dictator for life“. This title was given to him by the Python community as a sign of respect to the project’s chief decision-maker. After Guido, Python core developers elected a five-member “Steering Council” to lead the project in January 2019.
The very first version of python was 0.9.0 released on the 20th of February 1991. And the latest was 3.10.2 released on 14th January 2022. Significant changes to the original changes were made in the 2.0 version which was released on 16 October 2000. New features such as a cycle-detecting garbage collector for memory management and support for Unicode was added
Throughout its development, features like classes with inheritance, exception handling, functions, and the core datatypes such as list, dict, str and so on were added. The primary discussion forum for Python, comp.lang.python, was formed, in 1994 marking a milestone in the growth of Python’s user-base.
Use Cases of Python
Python is a powerful tool that has vast ability and its uses are deep-rooted in some of the advanced techs. The versatility of Python applications begins from web development to machine learning.
Here are the top uses of Python in the tech world:
Web application development
It is the go-to programming language for web applications. It provides security, convenience, and scalability to applications. Web development frameworks such as Django and Flask, contribute to rapid app development. All the web development frameworks of python are packed with standard libraries, intended to reduce the development time and provide more time-to-market for the web application.
Data Science
Data science is a highly demanded skill and using python is becoming easier to solve difficult problems. Several Python libraries like Pandas, NumPy, SciPy helps you in decision making from a large set 1of data.
Using python you can visualize the data through graphs, which makes the insights more meaningful.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning
Arguably the most interesting of python programming. It is a stable and secure language that can handle large calculations required for developing Machine Learning models. Similar to web development, it has an extensive collection of libraries for Machine Learning applications. These include SciPy, Pandas, Keras, TensorFlow, NumPy and many more.
Using Python language in Artificial intelligence we can perform advanced computing, data analytics, image recognition, text & data processing and much more.
Game development
Here is the list of Python projects in the gaming industry: Battlefield 2, Frets on Fire, World of Tanks, etc. These games use Python libraries like PySoy and PyGame for development. It allows game developers to build a tree-based algorithm which is useful in designing multiple levels in a game. Python offers an opportunity to install a 3D game engine that helps in building powerful games and interfaces.
Web Scraping
Web scraping of massive amounts of data is helpful in extracting valuable customer information and making some smart decisions and turning it into big profits.
Robotics
Python is one of the core languages that is commonly used for robotic process automation (RPA), and it’s been used to do things like code industrial robot arms that can work in correlation with each other.
Automation
A python is a popular tool in DevOps because it makes automating systems and processes efficient and transparent. It is also used to automate complex systems, filling in a spreadsheet or responding to emails.
Try your python programs here.
Who uses Python today?
Around 8.2 million developers are using Python as their primary choice. It’s used by a variety of people like marketers, researchers, data scientists, kids, hobbyists, IT professionals etc.
Here’s the list of companies that use Python:
- Google products like Youtube use Python for a wide variety of things. As a matter of fact, Youtube was built using mostly Python!
- Industrial Light and Magic, the company famous for its special effects of Star Wars and hundreds of other films, has been using Python for years for its CGI and lighting work.
- Facebook and Instagram use Python for various elements of their infrastructure. For instance, Instagram is built entirely using Python and its Django framework.
- iRobot uses Python to develop the software for their robots.
- NASA and Jet Propulsion Lab use Python for research and scientific purposes.
- Netflix uses Python for the purpose of server-side data analysis and to a number of back-end apps that helps the streaming service online all the time
- Reddit runs on Python and its web.py framework.
- IBM, Intel, and a variety of other hardware companies use Python for hardware testing.
- Chase, Goldman Sachs, use Python for financial analysis and market forecasting.
- Quora is also built using Python.