INSIGHTS TO PYTHON
Have you ever heard of PYTHON?
Does the image of a constricting snake pop into your mind?
Well it’s time to introduce you to a powerful, yet wonderful programming language, namely ‘ PYTHON ’.
The interesting fact about it is that it is named after a very famous British comedy series, ‘Monty Python’s flying circus’, as its developer was a big fan of that show.
Doesn’t that sound cool?
Guido Van Rossum, dutch programmer, developed Python, influenced by two earlier primitive languages ‘ABC language’ and ‘Modula 3’.
Python is an interpreted, high-level, general-purpose,object oriented, programming language.
Let’s look at features of python in detail.Some advantages that it provide are:
1 Easy to use and express
It’s simple syntax and code make it a very user friendly language, easy to use, understand and implement. It has fewer lines of code. Hence it is a good choice for beginners. Moreover it expresses the code’s purpose better. Python is better for lengthy programs.
2 FREE , OPEN SOURCE, CROSS PLATFORM
Freely available to anyone, its source code is also available. So it can be modified, improved, extended. Besides, it can run on a variety of platforms , be it Windows, linux, unix, macintosh or even from supercomputers to smart phones.
3 Easy to debug
Being an interpreted language, that means the language processor used is interpreter, it executes line by line. Hence locating the error becomes quite easy for programmers, thus it is easily debugged compared to other counter parts.
4 All round functionality and variety of usage
Installing python itself provides you all types of modules for various functionality. For instance , its standard library is complete enough for diverse functionality such as emails, web pages, databases, GUI development, network connections and so forth. Hence it is complete in majorly all aspects.
Some diverse field applications are scripting, GUI programs , Game development (Yes, Cocos, Panda3d), System administration, Prototyping, Database application, web application and so on.
5 Rapid Prototyping
Rapid prototyping is the fast fabrication of a physical part, model or assembly using 3D computer aided design (CAD).
Rapid Prototyping is possible due to the small size of the code. However in other programming languages such as C++ , rapid Prototyping is not possible due to larger code size, attributed to their nature being middle level, and not so high level.C++ has a stiff learning curve as it has lots of predefined syntax and structure.
6 Dynamically typed
Python is dynamically typed. By that it means that type checking is performed at runtime. It means that the type of a variable is allowed to change over its lifetime.
While statically typed languages perform type checking at compile time.
The absence of a separate compilation step (which is much more common) means that you don’t have to wait for the compiler to finish before you can test changes that you’ve made to your code. Hence the debug cycle is much shorter and less cumbersome.
7 Garbage collection
The automatic process of making space in a computer’s memory by removing data that is no longer required or in use, is called garbage collection. It is a form of automatic memory management. It internally deals with memory addresses.
Python supports garbage collection.
8 Machine learning, AI
Used for Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and the general AI field.
Useful in data analysis and visualization. It has fascinating real world applications. Also it is cross-compatible.
9 Auto-installed shell
Python has its auto-installed shell. It provides an interactive shell which helps to test the things before it’s actual implementation.
10 Fast development speed
Python is designed to be accessible. A given Python program might take six seconds to execute whereas in other languages it takes a fraction of a second. However it might take only 10–20 minutes for a developer to put that Python program together, versus an hour or more of development time in other languages.
Python enjoys a vast and ever growing community of enthusiasts and developers.The demand and support for python are also on rise. Python has been consistently growing in popularity , and this is likely to continue, if not increase in future.
