Python was developed by Guido van Rossum in the year 1989. It is a very simple programming language, where even a beginner to programming would be able to learn the language without facing any issues. It is one of the most loved programming languages by developers, data scientists, software engineers, and even hackers because of its versatility, flexibility, and object-oriented features.
Although abundant reasons are associated with the use of this programming language, the following highlights a few reasons for its wide use over other languages.
Benefits of learning python
1. Popularity associated with Python
The primary reason associated with the popularity of Python is the ease of learning to code using this language. Many significant applications only support the Python language. Hence, when compared with the last 5 years, the Python programming language has grown to 17.6%.
2. Ease and Simplicity
It is the simplest and easiest to learn programming language due to this simple syntax and readability.
3. Python is portable & extensible
We can move Python programs from one platform to another and run them without any changes. The code could be run on any platform flawlessly and uninterruptedly.
4. Python is used in Data Science
Python is a high-level programming language that is fast, open sourced, friendly, robust and simple to use, and simple to learn.
Python is a language that is quickly learned and used even by beginners or any student by just learning the basics of it.
5. Python’s scripting & automation
Being an open-source scripting language, we can easily automate anything on Python. A python learner as a beginner can quickly learn its basics and gradually be able to write its scripts to automate data.
6. Python used with Big Data
Python is considered the best data science tool to process and analyse big data accurately. Even more prominent companies are adopting this language that makes the demand for Python developers very high.
7. Python supports Testing
Python is a valuable programming language that supports testing flawlessly. In a nutshell, Python is a robust destination to follow from test cases to test code. This gives a significant advantage to Python, as it tests the results quickly and accurately.
8. Python in Web Development
Since the usage of Python web development has increased significantly over time, developers can experience abundant web-oriented modules that are designed to assist people in needing functional websites.
Features of Python programming language
Applications
1. Data Science
The survey conducted by analyst O’Reilly in 2013 revealed that 40 percent of information scientists incorporate Python into their day-to-day work. They join programmers from other fields to result in Python being one of the best ten programming languages within the globe each year since 2003. There’s a joke within the Python community that Python is often the second-best language for everything.
The name is appropriated from Monty Python, which creator Guido Van Possum selected to point out that Python should be fun to use. It’s common to hunt out obscure Monty Python sketches referenced in Python code examples and documentation. For this reason, Python is much beloved by programmers. Thanks to Python’s extensibility and general-purpose nature, it had been inevitable as its popularity exploded that somebody would eventually start using it for data analytics. Python is free, open-source software, and consequently, anyone can write a library package to extend its functionality.
Data science has been an early beneficiary of these extensions, particularly Pandas. Pandas is the Python Data Analysis Library, used for everything from importing data from Excel spreadsheets to processing sets for time-series analysis. Pandas puts nearly every common data munging tool at your fingertips. This means that basic cleanup and a pair of advanced manipulations are often performed with Pandas’ powerful data frames. Pandas is created on top of NumPy, one amongst the earliest libraries behind Python’s data science success story. NumPy’s functions are exposed in Pandas for advanced numerical analysis.
2. Deep Learning
Deep learning is an AI function that mimics the workings of the human brain in processing data to be utilized in detecting objects, recognizing speech, translating languages, and making decisions.
Deep learning AI is a position to seek out without human supervision, drawing from data that’s both unstructured and unlabelled.
It is a sub — field of machine learning and is often used to help detect fraud or concealment, amongst other functions.
Deep learning has evolved hand-in-hand with the digital era, which has caused an explosion of knowledge altogether forms and from every region of the world. This data, known simply as big data, is drawn from sources like social media, internet search engines, e-commerce platforms, and online cinemas, amongst others. This enormous amount of data is quickly accessible and should be shared through fintech applications like cloud computing.
3. Web development
Web development is the building and maintenance of websites; it’s the work that happens behind the scenes to make an online site look great, work fast and perform well with a seamless user experience. Thanks to web development, people are more conscious of the services and/or products you’re offering, understand why your products are relevant and even necessary for them to buy or use, and see which of your company’s qualities set it aside from competitors
One area where Python shines is web development. Because Python takes significantly less time to create your projects compared to other programming languages, your ideas come to life tons faster, allowing you to realize feedback and iterate quickly.
Python is often used to build server-side web applications. While an online framework isn’t required to make web apps, rarely, developers wouldn’t use existing open-source libraries to hurry up their progress in getting their application working. Python is not used in a web browser. The language executed in browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer is JavaScript. Projects like pyjs can compile from Python to JavaScript. However, most Python developers write their web applications employing a mixture NI of Python and JavaScript. Python is executed on the server-side while JavaScript is downloaded to the client and travels by the online browser.
Python offers many frameworks from which to settle on including bottle.py, Flask, CherryPy, Pyramid, Django, and web2py. These frameworks are used to power a number of the world’s hottest sites like Spotify, Mozilla, Reddit, the Washington Post, and Yelp.
The Three Types of Web Developers:
- The Front-End Developer
- The Back-End Developer
- The Full-Stack Developer
4. Bioinformatics and computational molecular biology
Bioinformatics is an emerging field nowadays. With the pandemic situation of COVID-19, the field of bioinformatics has gotten great attention from scientists. Two different fields namely, Programming and biology are combined to form this field. Python plays an immense role in bioinformatics building a separate field under it called biopython.
Biopython provides Python-based developers resources for modules, scripts, and web links related to using bioinformatics. The main goal of biopython is to make it as easy as to use Python for bioinformatics by creating high-quality reusable modules and classes.
If you are already a Python developer, you do not have to put a huge effort into learning Biopython. You only need to focus on studying the biological concepts related to genetics and molecular biology.
GUIs in python
You may have seen in movies programmers working with massive lines of codes. What will happen if you have to work with your computer typing commands for each task? You will have to type commands for opening a file, closing a file, saving a file, and so on. This is where you need a GUI to work without commands.
If you are not yet familiar with programming, you might wonder what is GUI? It is the abbreviated form of Graphical User Interface. If you have user-friendly and colourful GUIs in your applications, it will increase the number of users as well as the reputation for your application. Like many high-level programming languages python also consists of GUI frameworks to build a pleasant and appealing look to the application. This makes it easier for the user to handle the program without much effort.
There are many frameworks for designing GUIs in python. “Tkinter” is the basic one and beginner level framework. Other than “Tkinter” there are some well-known frameworks for designing GUIs in python.
- PyQt5
- Kivy
- wxPython
- Libvag
- PySimpleGUI
- Pyforms
- Wax
- PySide2
- PyGUI
Hope this list will help you to find out and try on a framework to make your application attractive and user-friendly.
Helpful Packages and modules
Think you have a large program to code, about 100,000 lines in your coding script. A single bug in your program will make you go through all the lines of your coded script. To avoid this, you can split your script into several files. You can include the definitions in a separate file and use them in your script whenever you want interactively combining both files. Such files with definitions are called modules. Modules can be imported into other modules or to the main module.
In a standard Python library, there are over 200 hundred modules. These modules help to make your code shorter and clearer. Some of the helpful modules are described in this article. For importing a module to your Python file, you can use one of the following syntaxes.
1. import <module name>2. from <module name> import
If you want to include all functions in a specific module you should simply use an asterisk as shown below with the second syntax above.
from <module name> import *Let us dive deep into some important standard inbuilt modules in python.
1. Math module
This module in Python helps you to make your mathematical operations easier and more convenient. If you are not too confident about your mathematical calculations, and you do not need to make your code lengthier defining all the operations, the math module is there for you. You have to simply import it to your script as import math or from math import *.
2. Re module
This module stands for regular expressions. If you are working with files on Python, handling files is very important. This module will help you in extracting similar expressions like emails, telephone numbers, and addresses that are jumbled up in text files. This module works much similar to a search function in applications. So if you’re willing to add a search function to your application this module is a must to include.
3. Random module
If you are designing a number guessing game or a password creator this module will be really helpful. This module can generate a random number from the system. It can be an integer or a decimal, but not a negative number.
To know more about modules and packages you can visit Python official website.
How to install Python
Python installation is pretty simple, you can install it on any operating system such as Windows, Mac OS X, Ubuntu, etc. Just follow the steps in this article — Python Installation
Python is a great option, whether you’re a beginning programmer looking to find out the fundamentals, an experienced programmer designing an outsized application, or anywhere in between. The basics of Python are easily grasped, and yet its capabilities are vast. From my experience, Python programming may be a rewarding skill that will benefit you in your current role, and can certainly benefit you in future ones. Even if Python isn’t the last programming language you learn, it should certainly be your first.
Written by: Vinuri Senarathna, Izad Ijaz, Supun Sandanayaka
Sinhala Translator — Roshinie Jayasundara
Tamil Translator — Mohamed Izad
