Introduction to Python
Introduction
Python is a widely used general-purpose, interpreted, high level programming language developed by Guido van Rossum in 1991 at the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in the Netherlands.
Beginner’s Programming Language
Python is a very simple programming language so even if someone is new to programming, he can learn python without facing any issues.
Why Python is named as ‘Python’
Python is named after the comedy television show Monty Python's Flying Circus. It is not named after the Python snake.
Logo
The logo of Python is two Pythons (python snakes) that also indicates a relevant pattern of the letter ‘P’ and ‘y’, i.e., Py (the most widely accepted contraction for the name).
Features
• Easy to Learn and Code:
Python is a very programmer-friendly language and everyone can learn to code in Python easily.
As compared to other programming languages like Java, C, C++, and C#, Python is one of the easiest to learn.
Without having any other programming languages knowledge, we can learn python directly.
Syntax of python are simple and powerful that makes the programmers express their logic is fewer lines of code.
• Expressive Language: Python can perform complex tasks using a few lines of code. A simple example, the hello world program you simply type print("Hello World"). It will take only one line to execute, while Java or C takes multiple lines.
• Open Source and Free: Python is an open-source programming language which means that anyone can create and contribute to its development. Python is released under a GPL-compatible license. Python Software Foundation (PSF), a non-profit organization, holds the copyright of Python.
• Object-Oriented: It follows the concept of oops like polymorphism, inheritance, encapsulation, abstraction. This makes development and maintenance easier.
• Interpreted Language: Python is an interpreted language; it means the Python program is executed one line at a time. The advantage of being interpreted language, it makes debugging easy and portable.
• Dynamically Typed: Python is dynamically-typed. This means that the Python decided the type for a value at runtime and hence we do not need to specify the type of data while declaring it.
• Platform Independent: Python programs are platform independent (just like Java) that means once we write a Python program, it can run on any platform without rewriting once again (Python uses PVM to convert python code to machine understandable code).
• Rice Library: It provides a vast range of libraries for the various fields including machine learning, AI, scripting, etc.
• Dynamic Memory Allocation: Python provides automatic memory management. It automatically allocates the memory to the variable at run time.
• GUI Programming Support: Python provides various libraries for GUI development. PyQT5, Tkinter, Kivy, etc. are some of the common libraries.
Some drawbacks of Python
• Python is slower than C or C++.
• Python is very good for many desktop and server platforms, but it is seen as a weak language for mobile computing.
• Python language is dynamically typed so it has many design restrictions. It requires more testing time and the errors show up when the applications are finally run.
Some widely known products and applications that use Python
• Data Science and machine learning: Python is the best and most commonly used language for machine learning and data science. It has libraries (NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Tensorflow, etc.) available for data manipulation, data visualization, data cleaning, and several other related functionalities.
• Web Server Programming: Python can be used for server-side programming. Django and Flask are the most common Python libraries that can be used for it.
• Game Development: It is widely used in the development of games, including GUI. PyGame is one of the most commonly used library for game development.
• GUI Applications: By using libraries like Tkinter, pyQt and pyGame, we can easily develop desktop apps supporting GUI.