Python: The What and The Why

Novak
3 min readMay 14, 2021

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In this post, I will briefly introduce some of the main reasons behind Python’s popularity and will help you in sculpting a definition of python.

The What and The Why

What is Python?

Python refers to the Python programming language with syntax rules for writing what is considered valid Python code) and the Python interpreter software that reads source code (written in the Python language) and performs its instructions. The Python interpreter is free to download fromhttp://python.org/, and there are versions for Linux, OS X, and Windows.

The name Python comes from the surreal British comedy group Monty Python, not from the snake. Python programmers are affectionately called Pythonistas.

Why do people use Python?

There are many programming languages today, so this is usually the first question of beginners.

Easy to learn and use:

Python is astonishingly simple to use and one of the most accessible programming languages out there. It has a much simpler syntax than the other backend languages like C, Java, C++, etc.

Due to its ease of learning and usage, python codes can be easily written and executed much faster than other programming languages.

When Guido van Rossum was creating python in the 1980s, he made sure to design it to be a general-purpose language. One of the main reasons for the popularity of python would be its simplicity in syntax so that it could be easily read and understood even by amateur developers.

Mature and Supportive Python Community:

Python was created more than 40 years ago, which is a lot of time for any community of programming language to grow and mature adequately to support developers ranging from beginner to expert levels.

Many students get introduced to computer science only through Python language, which is the same language used for in-depth research projects.

If any programming language lacks developer support or documentation, then they don’t grow much. But python has no such kind of problems because it has been here for a very long time. The python developer community is one of the most incredibly active programming language communities.

Support from Renowned Corporate Sponsors:

Programming languages grow faster when a corporate sponsor backs them. For example, PHP is backed by Facebook, Java by Oracle and Sun, Visual Basic & C# by Microsoft. Python Programming language is heavily backed by Facebook, Amazon Web Services, and especially Google.

Google adopted the python language way back in 2006 and has used it for many applications and platforms since then.

Hundreds of Python Libraries and Frameworks

Due to its corporate sponsorship and big supportive community of python, python has excellent libraries that you can use to save your time and effort on the initial cycle of development. There are also lots of cloud media services that offer cross-platform support through library-like tools, which can be extremely beneficial.

There are many frameworks and libraries are available for python language, such as:

  • Matplotlib for plotting charts and graphs
  • SciPy for engineering applications, science, and mathematics
  • Beautiful Soup for HTML parsing and XML
  • NumPy for scientific computing
  • Django for server-side web development

We will also be going through many of these libraries in our upcoming posts.

First-choice Language

Python language is the first choice for many programmers and students due to the main reason for python being in high demand in the development market. Students and developers always look forward to learning a language that is in high demand. Python is undoubtedly the hottest cake in the market now.

Use of python in academics

Now python language is being treated as the core programming language in schools and colleges due to its countless uses in Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, Data Science, etc. It has now become a fundamental part of the development world that schools and colleges cannot afford not to teach the Python language.

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Novak

A hobbyist Pythonist who loves reading books and helping others