What is Python Programming Language?

When starting something new, you always want to make sure you’ve picked the right place to start. For programmers, developers, people wanting to learn to program for the first time or even just as a hobby, python is the best language to start. To understand what is Python, this is the best tutorial. Let’s start!!!

Why choose python?

Python is currently one of the most popular high-level languages. Guido van Rossum developed the language at the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in the late 1980s.

It has the advantage of being both powerful as well as simple to work with. It is especially famous for being shorter and easier to comprehend. This ease in turn helps reduce the time taken to write the code. The compactness and simplicity of the code help have a lower error rate.

Another major advantage is that it helps you focus on the solution to the problem and not the structure or syntax of the problem.

In today’s data age, python has become one of the major leading languages to work with. It is not only used to connect to various database systems but also for making accessing, working and modifying them easy.

It also can further handle large quantities of data and help visualize the data. You can then further perform complex mathematics on this data.

Another feature of python allows you to connect to a server. This feature is helpful in cases where web applications are being developed. It is also great for creating workflows alongside the software.

History of Python

The programming language was first developed in the Netherlands in the late 1980s but was first published by Guido van Rossum in February 1991.

The programming language has been majorly influenced by ABC language and Modula-3. The inspiration for the name for the language came from a TV series named Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Features Provided by Python

1. Simple and Easy to Learn

One of the main reasons why python over time has become a popular programming language is its simplicity. Reading the program or working with the syntax is straightforward and feels like you’re reading English.

Unlike other languages, the syntax does not need a semicolon to define the code block. The non-conventional syntax or the simplicity of the syntax allows it to be one of the easiest languages to work with or start learning coding with. Hence making it easy to learn.

2. Free and Open Source

When python was first developed, the developers had the idea to allow the community to help build and improve the software. This led to the concept of making python a free and open-source language.

This means that the software is free and available for all. This feature allows programmers to read, distribute and update/edit the software freely and easily.

3. High-level Language

With Python being a high-level language, it makes life easier for the programmer. Memory allocation becomes easier because automatic allocation takes place at run time when a variable is being assigned a value.

Python is closer to the human language than a machine language. This feature makes it easier for someone to learn the language, work with the language, and comprehend the language. Because of these features, the error rate in programs has drastically reduced.

4. Portable

Now that we have established that python is a high-level programming language and an open-source language there are advantages of having both. One of which is portability, this feature allows programmers to use python on different platforms and operating systems easily. Some of the Operating systems where you can use python are Linux, UNIX, Windows, Mac OS X / OS X / macOS etc.

5. Interpreted

To understand how an interpreted language works, Let us understand how a compiled language works. In a compiled language, the following steps take place:

• Write the code
• Convert the code to binary code for your computer to understand
• Run the converted code.

In an interpreted language on the other hand the following steps take place:

• Write the code
• Execute the code

When you write code in an interpreted language like python you eliminate steps involving converting the code to binary code for your computer to understand.

This feature helps the programmer to easily debug the code.

6. Object-Oriented & Procedure-oriented

Python is an object-oriented programming language. What this means is that the programmer focuses on the object at hand when they are writing the code, the program works around the object.

OOP works around parent-child relationships, this brings in the concepts of inheritance, polymorphism and encapsulation.

OOP also brings in the feature of creating reusable codes. This is one of the biggest advantages of python since you can use this reusable code when dealing with other objects.

Python is also a procedural language which means that the programmer can focus on the problem at hand while coding. This feature also brings in the concept of reusable codes and functions. You can use them at different times in different codes.

7. Extensible

By making python an extensible language, it allows programmers with experience and confidence in C and C++ to write python code in these languages.

Unlike Python, C and C++ are compiled languages that convert the code into binary/ machine code before execution.

8. Embeddable

Python is embeddable because it is also possible to write your python code in a source code in different languages like C, C++, JAVA etc.

And as stated before, programmers can write C or C++ code in the python source code.

9. Extensive Standard Library

Allowing python to be open-source and free for all programming languages, it enables different developers and programmers from around the world to build on the software.

Overtime, it has led to the creation of an extensive collection of libraries with different functionalities. These libraries come with built-in functions that make coding easier and more efficient.

10. Classes

Since python is an object-oriented programming language the concepts of inheritance, polymorphism and encapsulation are available to work with. This allows programmers to create and work with classes.

11. Functions

Function libraries come with built-in functions that you use and reuse. Python also comes with a collection of extensive inbuilt functions. You do not need to access these functions through any library and can call it as and when needed.

12. Modules

Sometimes classes and functions together can be useful for certain programs or concepts. For easy access of both together, python provides the module feature which groups the two.

13. Packages

Python packages are collections of python modules grouped together in one place. This helps programmers group similar modules together for easier access and sharing.

14. Supports exception handling

As a programmer when you work on certain codes you will have situations where a certain type of input can cause disruption to the program flow. This then can further lead to an infinite loop or the program crashing.

These inputs or problems that cause disruption are exceptions. Python has features that deal with exceptions and help avoid such situations.

15. Robust

The ease of understanding and working with python makes the language easy to debug as well as helps reduce the errors in the code. Along with this python being able to handle exceptions well makes the language robust.

16. Advanced features

Python also has a set of advanced features such as a list, data frames, dictionary and generator comprehensions that it provides.

17. GUI Programming Support

One of python’s vast range of libraries is the Graphic user interface library. Developers use this to develop desktop applications.

Cons of Python language

1. It is less memory efficient

The time taken is more because of dynamic allocation as well as the variables are not initialized.

2. Longer run time

Interpreter languages take a longer time to run since they don’t first compile the code to binary code.

3. Not suitable for Hardware programming

High-level languages like python are not used for hardware programming. These require low-level languages like assembly language or machine language that the machine can understand easily.

4. Weak for Mobile computing

Python is not the best language to work with if you want to work on mobile applications or development of mobile games.

5. Inefficient threading

Python uses a Global Interpreter Lock which only allows the execution of one thread at a time.

Where is Python used?

Now, we will look into the areas where Python is heavily used and some of the libraries used.

1. Web Scraping

Sometimes there’s a need to extract data from the internet. This process requires you to access the world wide web(WWW) using either a web browser or a hypertext transfer protocol(HTTP).

To do so python has a range of libraries that access the world wide web and extract data. Scrapy, BeautifulSoup, and newspaper3k are some of the most efficient libraries supported by python.

2. Data Mining

When you extract data from sources you get large amounts of data called raw data. Data mining is the process that helps get data from the raw data.

Only when you extract data from the raw data, you work with it and analyse it. Libraries such as BeautifulSoup, Orange, Scrapy help with this process.

3. Data cleaning

Once you convert the raw data to data you can work with, the cleaning process starts. Almost every time the data is going to contain errors that need fixing. The data cleaning step does cover this.

The data will have missing data, null data, outliers, corrupted data, incorrect data as well as redundant data that needs fixing.

Some of the python libraries that can help here are Beautifier, Datacleaner, PrettyPandas, scrubadub.

4. Data processing and Modelling

Once you have cleaned the data, you can now do analysis and come up with inferences on the data. You can do so by creating visual representations on the part of the data you study or the whole data.

To do so you have to process and model the data. The libraries that help you do so are NumPy, Keras, and Matplotlib.

5. Descriptive and Inferential Statistics

For mathematicians and statisticians, python libraries make life very easy. These libraries have predefined functions for calculating the measures of central tendency or even to identify the skewness or kurtosis of the data.

The libraries that support this are Scipy, Pandas, Scikit-learn.

6. Natural Language Processing

NLP focuses on understanding how we humans communicate with each other, understanding human speech and text. Python over time has come up with libraries to help do that. These libraries include NLTK, Natural Language Toolkit, spaCY, Pattern, PyNLPl

7. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

Machine learning is the process of using the data you have explored to gain insight into it. The machine then uses this knowledge to make educated guesses.

Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, focuses on replicating or trying to get as close to imitating the perception, learning, problem-solving, and decision-making capabilities of the human mind.

Python has various libraries to help people working on these aspects such as MDP, a collection of supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms. Some of the other libraries include mlpy, scikits-learn, Tensor flow, Keras.

8. Graphical Analysis

Many businesses need visualisation to better understand their data. Graphs are one of the most used ones. You can use python libraries such as NetworkX, PyTorch, Matplotlib, Seaborn, and Plotly.

9. Image Processing

Image processing is the process of converting images to digital images and manipulating them. SciKit-Learn is one of the most used libraries.

10. Scientific Computing and Numeric Computing

To perform arithmetic, numeric and scientific computing you use pre-existing functions in python libraries such as SciPy, Pandas, IPython, Numeric Python, NetworkX, scikit-image, h5py, scikit-learn, PyTables.

11. Scripting

When there is a need to help with simple tasks or redundant tasks such as with standard emails or standard responses, python can be helpful. Python allows scripting that is the creation of small programs to automate these simple or redundant tasks.

12. Game Development

Python also has libraries to help with game development such as PyGame, Pyganim. These libraries help with coding and developing games as well as work on the animation required for it.

13. Web Development (Server-side)

Python has libraries that help in the creation and working of the server-side of web development. Some of these include libraries like Django, Flask, Pyramid, and CherryPy.

14. Graphic User Interface

Python also has libraries for developers that work on Graphic user Interface and how to make the interface better and easier to navigate through. They have a wide range of python library options to choose from such as wxWidgets, GTK+, Kivy, Delphi, Qt

Python Architecture and Working

1. Parser

The parser module is the interface between python internal parser and byte-code compiler. The python code uses it to edit the parse tree of an expression and then create the subsequent executable code.

2. Compiler

Python uses the compiler to convert the python code to an intermediate bytecode. The CPython virtual machine can interpret this code.

3. Interpreter

The interpreter reads and interprets the code generated by the compiler which is then executed line by line in the read-evaluate-print-loop method.

Top Companies that use Python

Many of the popular and frequently used applications and websites use python code. Some of the companies that have adopted python for their products are:

1. Facebook

The tech giant that owns Instagram and WhatsApp has been using C, PHP and Python as their top programming languages.

2. Instagram

Instagram, which released in 2010, to be later bought by Facebook in 2012 is one of the most famous and widely used photo-sharing applications. They use python in the backend. Instagram is one of the largest deployments of the Django web framework that is completely written in python.

3. Google

Over time, Python has become one of the most widely used programming languages at Google and recognized as an official language at Google.

4. Netflix

Netflix was first created in 1997 as a movie rental service provider. They allowed users to order movies online and have the DVDs delivered to them. Over time the establishment moved on to the internet. Now they use python as their main language. They use it for everything from operations management and analysis to security and networking.

5. Spotify

Founded in 2006, Spotify is an audio streaming and media services provider. The software uses many different languages but the main language used is Python.

6. Quora

Quora created in 2009 and is a website where internet users add questions and other users answer the questions. The front end of the website uses PHP while most of the other development uses Python.

7. Dropbox

Dropbox is a file hosting service created in 2008. It has about four million lines of Python code. Python is the most used language for its back-end services and desktop app.

8. Reddit

Reddit is a social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website created in 2005. The Reddit software uses python for its core.

Python Constructs

1. List in Python

Lists are one of the data-structure in python. They are mutable( changeable) and each element or value that is inside of a list is an item. To create a list you use square brackets as shown below:

list1=["welcome","to","PythonGeeks",2021]
print(list1)

Output:

2. Tuple in Python

Tuples are the second type of data structures used in python. They also store many variables in a single variable. Yet, they are immutable and so once defined, it’s impossible to modify. To create a tuple, you use round brackets as shown below:

tuple1=("Hello","world",1,2,3)
print(tuple1)

Output:

3. Dictionary in Python

Dictionaries are the third type of data structures in python. A dictionary consists of key-value pairs and is mutable. You can use keys to access the values or vice versa. You define dictionaries using curly brackets as shown below:

dictionary1 = {1:"one",2:"two",3:"three"}
print(dictionary1)

Output:
{1: ‘one’, 2: ‘two’, 3: ‘three’}

Career prospects in python

Over the last few decades, with the rise in consumption and generation of data the demand for python programmers has increased.

As stated in Wikipedia, Python has been part of the top 10 programming languages since 2003 and as of 2021, it’s the 3rd most popular and sought-after language after C and Java.

Some of the major fields using the language are:

• Software Engineer
• Python Developer
• Research Analyst
• Data Analyst
• Data Scientist
• Software Developer

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1. Is python a Programming or scripting language?

Ans 1. Python is a general-purpose programming language. But, Python is capable of scripting as well.

Q2. Why is python an interpreted language?

Ans 2. As the python code is not converted to binary code or machine code before execution. Instead, the compiler creates a bytecode which the python interpreter interprets. And this code is then executed which makes it an interpreted language.

Q3. What is the difference between python modules and python packages?

Ans 3. Python modules are a collection of python classes and python functions. Python packages are a collection of python modules.

Q4. How is memory managed in Python?

Ans: Python’s memory management is in charge of allocating heap space for Python objects. Python also has a garbage collector that recycles all unused memory and makes it available to the heap space.

Q5. Is python an OOP language or a procedural language?

Ans 5. Python is an object-oriented programming language. Yet, also a procedural language as well as a structural language.

Summary

We looked at what is python as a language and why over time it has become a major part of the programming world. We also saw what features help make the language better and more efficient for it to overtake other languages and be more sought after.