Is Python the preferred language for your next development project?

While there is a lot of buzz around Python lately, it is definitely not something new. In December 1989, Van Rossum; A dutch programmer working in the US had been looking for a 'hobby' programming project that would keep him occupied during the week around Christmas as his office was closed. This is when he decided to write an interpreter for a new scripting language he had been thinking about lately.

It was named Python after “Monty Python's Flying Circus”, a British comedy which Van Rossum was reading during the time.

30+ years later, Python is still One of the most popular if not the most popular language on GitHub. Python has been among the 10 most popular programming languages every year since 2004 according to the TIOBE Programming Community Index and got the number one spot on the index in 2022 as well. It was continuously selected Programming Language of the Year (for "the highest rise in ratings in a year") during the last few years.

Its incredible 3-decade journey means that it is one of the most documented & studied programming languages. It’s a gold standard in most programming courses at universities and its simplicity and English-like syntax means that anyone could easily learn Python.

Its’ high-level built-in data structures, combined with dynamic typing and dynamic binding, make it a good choice for Rapid Application Development.

Van Rossum worked at Google from 2005 to December 2012, and that brought a new leap of life to Python. He was the "benevolent dictator for life" (BDFL) for Python until he stepped down from the position in 2018, and currently a Python Steering Council oversees the progression of the language.

The principles of Python could be summarized below. (From Zen of Python, Tim Peters 1999)

Beautiful is better than ugly.

Explicit is better than implicit.

Simple is better than complex.

Complex is better than complicated.

Flat is better than nested.

Sparse is better than dense.

Readability counts.

Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.

Although practicality beats purity.

Errors should never pass silently.

Unless explicitly silenced.

In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.

There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.

Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.

Now is better than never.

Although never is often better than right now.

If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.

If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.

Namespaces are one honking great idea – let's do more of those!

Python is One of the few languages that checks all the tick boxes of the Wikipedia programming language comparison which includes Imperative, Object Oriented (aspect-oriented to be accurate), Functional, Procedural, Generic, Reflective and Event Driven capabilities.

With the official repository for third-party Python software containing over 415,000 packages (as of 2022), it is definitely a programing language with a lot of functionality. It is often described as a "batteries included" programming language due to its comprehensive standard library.

It is commonly used as a scripting language for web apps, scientific computation, data manipulation, artificial intelligence and machine learning/natural language processing applications. The rise of data science, AI and ML applications has popularized Python as One of the preferred programming languages for those domains. Some of the popular tools/libraries are TensorFlow, Keras, Numpy, Panda, Pytorch, and Scikit-learn.

Compared to compiled programming languages, Python is slower as it is an interpreted language, meaning the Python source code needs to be converted into bytecode before being executed by the Python virtual machine. (There is a discussion that it has both compilation and interpretation steps but it is stated as an interpreted language according to official Python documentation.)

However, despite its famed slowness compared to languages like Java, it maintains its position as a top programming language because of several reasons.

1. It’s easy to learn and fast to code & debug.

2. Huge community support over the years.

3. Supports many programming paradigms.

4. Python is backed by big IT players like Google and Microsoft (Do you know that Python author now works for Microsoft?) Google did a major adaptation of the language in many of its products and that would have supported the rise of Python.

5. The number of libraries available across many different domains.

6. Python is used as a programing language for teaching at universities.

7. It's free and open source even for commercial purposes.

8. It’s a preferred language for scripting and automation of IT operations.

9. Growing applications in data science, ML/NLP & big data.

10. Python is portable running on Windows, macOS, Linux/Unix and android.

Python comparison with other languages.

• https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ - 1st as of Dec 2022

• https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html - 1st of Dec 2022

• https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-popular-technologies-language - 4th place 2022

Now you know that Python is One of the top programming languages for you to build your next project. According to Glassdoor (2022 Dec), the average salary of a Python developer in the US is 102,375 $. If you’re on the lookout for highly skilled Python developers at a fraction of the cost, contact us for available profiles and pricing. Bluecorp is ready to get you started with a Python development team by 2023.

A quick poll on Python

• Already using Python at my organization
• My organization is planning to start Python development soon
• We're using another programming language
• Python is not suitable for our requirement